Game-Theoretic Modeling and Control of Military Air Operations with Civilian Players

It is well known that civilians often play an active role in wars. That is, they are not just passively static but might purposefully take actions to help one side in a battle to minimize their losses or achieve some political purpose. Unfortunately, existing game theoretic models usually do not consider this situation, even though collateral damage has been considered in a paper on a two-player game model. In this paper, a three-player attrition-type discrete time dynamic game model is formulated, in which there are two opposing forces and one civilian player that might be either neutral or slightly biased. We model the objective functions, control strategies of different players, and identify the associated constraints on the control and state variables. Existing attrition-like state space models can be regarded as a special case of the model proposed in this paper. An example scenario and extensive simulations illustrate possible applications of this model, and comparative discussions further clarify the benefits.