Weapon Target Assignment with Combinatorial Optimization Techniques

Abstract

Weapon Target Assignment (WTA) is the assignment of friendly weapons to the hostile targets in order to protect friendly assets or destroy the hostile targets and considered as a NP-complete problem. Thus, it is very hard to solve it for real time or near-real time operational needs. In this study, genetic algorithm (GA), tabu search (TS), simulated annealing (SA) and Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) combinatorial optimization techniques are applied to the WTA problem and their results are compared with each other and also with the optimized GAMS solutions. Algorithms are tested on the large scale problem instances. It is found that all the algorithms effectively converge to the near global optimum point(s) (a good quality) and the efficiency of the solutions (speed of solution) might be improved according to the operational needs. VNS and SA solution qualities are better than both GA and TS.