The Specification of Air-to-Air Combat Tactics Using UML Sequence Diagram

Abstract

Air force air-to-air combat tactics are occurring at a high speed in three-dimensional space. The specification of the tactics requires dealing with a quite amount of information, which makes it a challenge to accurately describe the maneuvering procedure of the tactics. The specification of air-to-air tactics using natural languages is not suitable because of the intrinsic ambiguity of natural languages. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach of using UML Sequence Diagram to describe air-to-air combat tactics. Since the current Sequence Diagram notation is not sufficient to express all aspects of the tactics, we extend the syntax of the Sequence Diagram to accommodate the required features of air-to-air combat tactics. We evaluate the applicability of the extended Sequence Diagram to air-to-air combat tactics using a case example, that is the manned-unmanned teaming combat tactic. The result shows that Sequence Diagram specification is more advantageous than natural language specification in terms of readability, conciseness, and accuracy. However, the expressiveness of the Sequence Diagram is evaluated to be less powerful than natural language, requiring further study to address this issue.