Multilevel Coalition Formation Strategy for Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses Missions

This paper investigates the problem of how to form coalitions in teams of heterogeneous vehicles. In particular, a coordination strategy is designed for unmanned vehicles to autonomously carry out the suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) mission, which would benefit from a heterogeneous network of unmanned vehicles to search and destroy threats in an unexplored area. Inspiration for this work is drawn from natural systems, and we consider the alliance-formingbehavior of bottlenose dolphins as a guiding example.A two-phased approach is taken to develop the bioinspired strategy. First, in the context of multi-agent systems, a mathematical model is produced that expressively captures the alliance-forming behavior. Next, this model is tailored to the suppression of enemy air defenses mission: the target application. Advantages of using this bioinspired approach are discussed and simulations are provided to demonstrate its operation.