An efficient rule-based constructive heuristic to solve dynamic weapon-target assignment problem

In this paper, we propose an efficient rule-based heuristic to solve asset-based dynamic weapon-target assignment (DWTA) problems. The main idea of the proposed heuristic is to utilize the domain knowledge of DWTA problems to directly achieve weapon assignment, without large number of function evaluations. We update the saturation states of constraints in the assignment process to guarantee the feasibility of generated solutions. For the purpose of testing the performance of the proposed heuristic, we build a general Monte Carlo simulation-based DWTA framework. For comparison, we also employ a Monte Carlo method (MCM) to make DWTA decisions in different defense scenarios. From simulations with DWTA instances under different scales, the heuristic has obvious advantages over the MCM with regard to solution quality and computation time. The proposed method can solve large-scale DWTA problems (e.g., those including 100 weapons, 100 targets, and four defense stages) within only a few seconds.