Modeling and optimization of multi-stage sensor-weapon-target assignment

Based on the static variant of the sensor-weapon-target assignment (S-WTA) problem, we built a mathematical model for the multi-stage S-WTA problem, with the objective of minimizing the expected remaining threat value of the incoming targets, by dividing the operational process into several interception stages. In order to solve this problem, the multi-stage S-WTA problem was decomposed into two combat resource assignment subproblems. Firstly, a knowledge-based incremental constructive heuristic was proposed to solve the multi-stage weapon-target assignment subproblem. With the obtained weapon-target assignment scheme, a marginal-loss-based constructive heuristic was proposed to solve the multi-stage sensor-target assignment subproblem. Thus, we can obtain valid solutions of the multi-stage S- WTA problem by incorporating the proposed two fast constructive heuristic algorithms with low complexity. A random sampling method based on random permutations (RP) was employed as the competitor, and some simulation experiments were carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic. The computational result indicates that the proposed heuristic outperforms its competitor for most of the test instances, in terms of both solution quality and time cost. © 2019, Editorial Department of Control Theory & Applications South China University of Technology. All right reserved.