Modeling the Impact of High Energy Laser Weapon on the Mission Effectiveness of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles

With the rapid development of high energy laser weapons (HELWs), the integration of HELW on unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) has become a hot research topic. To study the impact of HELW on UCAV mission effectiveness, this paper proposes a 4-level design framework based on the system-of-system (SoS) oriented design. To validate the framework, the impact of HELW is analyzed in four aspects: the strike capability, the stealth performance, the vulnerability, and the defense capability, where the UCAV design constrains are noted. Simulation experiments of penetration scenario are carried out using agent-based modeling and simulation. The simulation results show that the integration of HELW can increase the survivability and mission effectiveness rate (MER) of the UCAV, especially for UCAVs with high speed and stealth performance. But the MER of the UCAV does not increase with the increase of HELW output power in most cases, indicating the importance of balancing the HELW and UCAV performances in concept design.