A Pursuit-Evasion Differential Game with Strategic Information Acquisition

In this paper, we study a two-person linear-quadratic-Gaussian pursuit-evasion differential game with costly but controlled information. One player can decide when to observe the other player’s state. But one observation of another player’s state comes with two costs: the direct cost of observing and the implicit cost of exposing his/her state. We call games of this type a Pursuit-Evasion-Exposure-Concealment (PEEC) game. The PEEC game constitutes two types of strategies: The control strategies and the observation strategies. We fully characterize the Nash control strategies of the PEEC game using techniques such as completing squares and the calculus of variations. We show that the derivation of the Nash observation strategies and the Nash control strategies can be decoupled. We develop a set of necessary conditions that facilitate the numerical computation of the Nash observation strategies. We show in theory that players with less maneuverability prefer concealment to exposure. We also show that when the game’s horizon goes to infinity, the Nash observation strategy is to observe periodically. We conduct a series of numerical experiments to study the proposed PEEC game. We illustrate the numerical results using both figures and animation. Numerical results show that the pursuer can maintain high-grade performance even when the number of observations is limited. We also show that an evader with low maneuverability can still escape if the evader increases his/her stealthiness.

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