A Probabilistic Flow Framework for Decentralized Cooperative Active Area Defense in Swarm-on-Swarm Interceptions

Active area protection against unauthorized UAV swarms requires coordinated target assignment strategies that account for both low-level physical capabilities and the stochastic, consumptive nature of physical interceptions. This paper presents a decentralized target assignment framework based on probabilistic flow optimization. By utilizing an aerodynamics-aware flight model, we derive a probabilistic prior to capture the geometric dependency of terminal interception success under high-velocity maneuvers. Modeling the defense process as a probabilistic consumption flow couples initial tactical assignments with conditional transition flows, allowing surviving defensive assets to be proactively redistributed to secondary unauthorized intrusions. To resolve this problem under practical communication and sensing constraints, we develop the Distributed Flow-regularized Market-based Consensus (DFMC) algorithm. The proposed algorithm decomposes the global optimization into localized subproblems and employs a water-filling projection to plan secondary paths. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework yields improved interception rates and better spatial resource dispersion compared to conventional auction-based baselines, while maintaining stable scalability in dense interception scenarios.