Hybrid Nested Partitions method with Intelligent Greedy Search for solving Weapon-Target Assignment Problem

The Weapon-Target Assignment (WTA) problem is one of the most important problems of military applications of operations research. The objective of the WTA problem is to find proper assignments of weapons to targets which minimize the expected damage of defensive side. The WTA problem is known to be NP-complete. In this paper, hybrid Nested Partitions (NP) method is proposed to solve WTA problems. The proposed algorithm is named as “Hybrid NP method with intelligent greedy search”. The NP method has been found to be very effective for solving complex large-scale discrete optimization problems. In addition to that, due to the inherent flexibility of the NP method, any other heuristic for generating good feasible solutions can be incorporated and improve the performance of the NP method. The intelligent greedy search is an improved version of greedy search which finds good solutions very quickly. The proposed algorithm combines the advantages of the NP method and intelligent greedy search. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is very efficient for solving the WTA problem.