Efficient Heuristic Approach to the Weapon-Target Assignment Problem

The Weapon Target Assignment (WTA) problem is a fundamental defense application of operations research. The problem consists of optimally assigning a given number of weapons to a set of targets so that the post-engagement total expected survival value of the targets is minimized. Since the WTA problem is known to be NP-complete, there are no exact methods to solve it. This paper presents two innovative heuristic algorithms based on Simulated Annealing and Threshold Accepting methods to solve the general WTA problem. Our computational results show that by using these algorithms, relatively large instances of the WTA problem can be solved near-optimally in a few seconds on a standard PC.