An Efficient Algorithm for the Weapon Target Assignment Problem

The weapon target assignment (WTA) problem that arises in defense related applications is to find a proper assignment of weapons to the enemy's targets with the objective of minimizing the total expected survival value of all targets. The WTA problem can be formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem, and falls into the category of NP-Complete problems. This paper proposes an efficient approximation algorithm for this problem. The algorithm is to define new approximating subproblems on the original problem, which forms a feasible descent iteration scheme for finding a suboptimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.