Real-time Allocation of Firing Units To Hostile Targets

A severe threat encountered in many international peacekeeping and peace forcing operations is that of rockets, artillery, and mortars (RAM) fired by insurgents towards military bases, troops, and other assets. Attacks like these have cost many human lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan during recent years. Similar attacks are faced by civilians in some parts of Israel on a regular basis, where so called Katyusha and Qassam rockets are fired against Israeli population centers such as Sderot and Ashkelon. Asymmetrical threats like these have caused an increased interest in systems for detecting and tracking incoming RAM before they hit their intended targets. The detection and tracking of RAM makes it possible to estimate the point of impact, so that any troops or civilians in the impact area can be alerted. However, such a warning is not always enough, due to very quick course of events, and that buildings and infrastructure will be destroyed no matter how early warnings come, given that active countermeasures are not taken. Hence, one would like to destroy incoming RAM before they hit their intended targets (and before they risk causing collateral damage upon destruction). Systems for detecting, tracking, and engaging RAM are often referred to as Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar (C-RAM) systems. An example of such a system is the recently deployed Israeli Iron Dome system. Another kind of air defense situation is that in which we would like to protect defended assets against maneuvering targets such as fighter aircrafts, attack helicopters, and non-ballistic missiles. For such kind of threats, we can in general not easily predict which defended asset (if any) is the intended target of an attack, making it necessary to estimate the level of threat posed by detected targets to the defended assets in a so-called threat evaluation process. When faced with many simultaneous threats, it is unlikely that the defenders can take action against all incoming threats, since there often are fewer firing units available than there are threats. Even when this is not the case, a problem is to know which firing unit to use against which threat in order to maximize the survivability of the defended assets or minimize the total expected target value of surviving hostile targets. This can be described as a resource allocation problem, known as the weapon allocation problem [7] within the field of operations research. Unfortunately, the allocation of defensive firing units to targets has been shown to be NP-complete [23]. The time available for weapon allocation depends on many factors such as the type of RAM used, the range from which it is fired, type of detection radar and type of defensive weapons (rapid-fire guns, lasers, radarguided missiles, etc.). However, taking into account that the incoming threats often have high speed and are fired from a range of only a few kilometers, very short time is available for detection, weapon allocation, and