Analysis method of aircraft combat survivability: Progress and challenge

Military aircraft always encounters the weapon systems when performing its combat mission. Survivability analysis for aircraft design improvements has become a hot topic in aeronautical field. The research history and current advances are reviewed in this paper. The quantitative analysis methods of survivability are summarized from two aspects, susceptibility and vulnerability. Attentions are paid to the following research process including detection susceptibility models of typical signal sources, susceptibility models under the radar countermeasures, susceptibility assessment methods under the infrared countermeasures; and determining the shielding or masking relationships among components, component kill criteria and metrics, vulnerability computation methods for shielding components and high-dimensional states, method for finding the most vulnerable regions or components, et al. Furthermore, considering the system-of-system combat and advanced weapon system in the future, the problems of survivability assessment deserving further investigations are proposed, such as the susceptibility assessment method under the Network Centric Warfare, payoff and trade studies for selection of susceptibility countermeasures and devices, the damage mechanism and kill criteria of vulnerable components, vulnerability assessment method under advanced weapons and the coupling of multiple damage mechanisms, degraded states vulnerability analysis under the context of big data, and so on.