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This paper investigates the application of game-theoretic principles combined with advanced Kalman filtering techniques to enhance maritime target tracking systems. Specifically, the paper presents a two-player, imperfect information, non-cooperative, sequential game framework for optimal decision making for a tracker and an evader. The paper also investigates the effectiveness of this game-theoretic decision making framework by comparing it with single-objective optimisation methods based on minimising tracking uncertainty. Rather than modelling a zero-sum game between the tracker and the evader, which presupposes the availability of perfect information, in this paper we model both the tracker and the evader as playing separate zero-sum games at each time step with an internal (and imperfect) model of the other player. The study defines multi-faceted winning criteria for both tracker and evader, and computes winning percentages for both by simulating their interaction for a range of speed ratios. The results indicate that game theoretic decision making improves the win percentage of the tracker compared to traditional covariance minimization procedures in all cases, regardless of the speed ratios and the actions of the evader. In the case of the evader, we find that a simpler linear escape action is most effective for the evader in most scenarios. Overall, the results indicate that the presented sequential-game based decision making framework significantly improves win percentages for a player in scenarios where that player does not have inherent advantages in terms of starting position, speed ratio, or available time (to track / escape), highlighting that game theoretic decision making is particularly useful in scenarios where winning by using more traditional decision making procedures is highly unlikely.

Contemporary undertakings provide limitless opportunities for widespread application of machine reasoning and artificial intelligence in situations characterised by uncertainty, hostility and sheer volume of data. The paper develops a valuation network as a graphical system for higher-level fusion and reasoning under uncertainty in support of the human operators. Valuations, which are mathematical representation of (uncertain) knowledge and collected data, are expressed as credal sets, defined as coherent interval probabilities in the framework of imprecise probability theory. The basic operations with such credal sets, combination and marginalisation, are defined to satisfy the axioms of a valuation algebra. A practical implementation of the credal valuation network is discussed and its utility demonstrated on a small scale example., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures

This paper presents a succinct review of attempts in the literature to use game theory to model decision making scenarios relevant to defence applications. Game theory has been proven as a very effective tool in modelling decision making processes of intelligent agents, entities, and players. It has been used to model scenarios from diverse fields such as economics, evolutionary biology, and computer science. In defence applications, there is often a need to model and predict actions of hostile actors, and players who try to evade or out-smart each other. Modelling how the actions of competitive players shape the decision making of each other is the forte of game theory. In past decades, there have been several studies which applied different branches of game theory to model a range of defence-related scenarios. This paper provides a structured review of such attempts, and classifies existing literature in terms of the kind of warfare modelled, the types of game used, and the players involved. The presented analysis provides a concise summary about the state-of-the-art with regards to the use of game theory in defence applications, and highlights the benefits and limitations of game theory in the considered scenarios., Comment: 37 pages

The Bernoulli filter is a Bayes filter for joint detection and tracking of a target in the presence of false and miss detections. This paper presents a mathematical formulation of the Bernoulli filter in the framework of possibility theory, where uncertainty is represented using {\em possibility} functions, rather than {\em probability} distributions. Possibility functions model the uncertainty in a non-additive manner, and have the capacity to deal with partial (incomplete) problem specification. Thus, the main advantage of the possibilistic Bernoulli filter, derived in this paper, is that it can operate even in the absence of precise measurement and/or dynamic model parameters. This feature of the proposed filter is demonstrated in the context of target tracking using multi-static Doppler shifts as measurements., Comment: 23 pages

The problem is target motion analysis (TMA), where the objective is to estimate the state of a moving target from noise corrupted bearings-only measurements. The focus is on recursive TMA, traditionally solved using the Bayesian filters (e.g. the extended or unscented Kalman filters, particle filters). The TMA is a difficult problem and may cause the algorithms to diverge, especially when the measurement noise model is imperfect or mismatched. As a robust alternative to the Bayesian filters for TMA, we propose the recently introduced possibility filter. This filter is implemented in the sequential Monte Carlo framework, and referred to as the possibility particle filter. The paper demonstrates its superior performance against the standard particle filter in the presence of a model mismatch, and equal performance in the case of the exact model match., Comment: 3 figures, keywords: Target motion analysis; bearings-only tracking; robust stochastic filtering; Monte Carlo estimation; possibility distribution

The generalized labeled multi-Bernoulli (GLMB) is a family of tractable models that alleviates the limitations of the Poisson family in dynamic Bayesian inference of point processes. In this paper, we derive closed form expressions for the void probability functional and the Cauchy-Schwarz divergence for GLMBs. The proposed analytic void probability functional is a necessary and sufficient statistic that uniquely characterizes a GLMB, while the proposed analytic Cauchy-Schwarz divergence provides a tractable measure of similarity between GLMBs. We demonstrate the use of both results on a partially observed Markov decision process for GLMBs, with Cauchy-Schwarz divergence based reward, and void probability constraint., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory