Solving Weapon-Target Assignment Problems by a New Ant Colony Algorithm

A new ant colony algorithm for weapon-target assignment (WTA) problems is proposed. The proposed algorithm is a parallel mechanism based on ant colony optimization (ACO) and has cooperative interactions among ant colonies. It has both the advantage of ACO, the ability to find feasible solutions and to avoid premature convergence, and the advantage of heuristics, the ability to conduct fine-tuning to find better solutions. A comparison of the proposed algorithm with several existing search approaches shows that the new algorithm outperforms its competitors on all tested WTA problems.

1. Introduction

The WTA (weapon-target assignment) problem is to find a proper assignment of weapons to target s with the objective of minimizing the expected operational loss of the warship formation. It is an important task for the commanders to make a proper WTA to defend own warships. Optimization of WTA problem is the key content of air defense operational command and control. It has been shown that a WTA problem is a NP-compete problem, and it is difficult to solve this type of problems directly.