The study of autonomous multi-agent interactions has received considerable interest in the recent years. This is mainly due to their applicability in modeling complex strategic phenomena arising in areas such as surveillance, rescue missions, combat operations, navigation, and analysis of biological behaviors. This work is concerned with analyzing strategic situations observed in the engineering applications such as, a defense system protecting critical infrastructures (e.g., air crafts, naval ships) against attacks from incoming missiles and interceptor defending an asset against intrusions. A common feature in the above strategic situations is the presence of multiple agents which are at conflict or cooperation that evolves over time. These situations are usually analyzed using the mathematical framework of pursuit-evasion games with three players–Target, Attacker and Defender–and referred to as a Target-Attacker-Defender (TAD) game.

In this work, we study a variation of a TAD game, with multiple active targets, one defender and an attacker. We assume that the defender is equipped with a flexible (and powerful) capability to autonomously switch roles from being a rescuer to an interceptor and vice-versa. Augmenting receding horizon approach with open-loop Nash equilibrium solution concept, we obtain switching strategies of the agents. We analyze the performance of these strategies and provide results related to the behavior of the agents.