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Evasion strategies of a three-player lifeline game

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Abstract

This study examines a multi-player pursuit-evasion game, more specifically, a three-player lifeline game in a planar environment, where a single evader is tasked with reaching a lifeline prior to capture. A decomposition method based on an explicit policy is proposed to address the game qualitatively from two main aspects: (1) the evader’s position distribution to guarantee winning the game (i.e., the escape zone), which is based on the premise of knowing the pursuers’ positions initially, and (2) evasion strategies in the escape zone. First, this study decomposes the three-player lifeline game into two two-player sub-games and obtains an analytic expression of the escape zone by constructing a barrier, which is an integration of the solutions of two sub-games. This study then explicitly partitions the escape zone into several regions and derives an evasion strategy for each region. In particular, this study provides a resultant force method for the evader to balance the active goal of reaching the lifeline and the passive goal of avoiding capture. Finally, some examples from a lifeline game involving more than one pursuer are used to verify the effectiveness and scalability of the evasion strategies.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Innovative Research Groups of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61621063) and Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 1613225).

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Author notes

  1. Zhang F and Zha W Z have the same contribution to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Fan Zhang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Control and Decision of Complex System, Beijing, 100081, China

    Fan Zhang

  3. Information Science Academy, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, Beijing, 100086, China

    Wenzhong Zha

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  1. Fan Zhang
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  2. Wenzhong Zha
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Correspondence to Wenzhong Zha.

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Zhang, F., Zha, W. Evasion strategies of a three-player lifeline game. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 61, 112206 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-017-9408-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-017-9408-6

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