Multi-Objective Cooperative Salvo Attack Against Group Target

This paper proposes a solution for the problem of cooperative salvo attack of multiple cruise missiles against targets in a group. Synchronization of the arrival time of missiles to hit their common target, minimizing the time consumption of attack and maximizing the expected damage to group targets are taken into consideration simultaneously. These operational objectives result in a hierarchical mixed-variable optimization problem which includes two types of subproblems, namely the multi-objective missile-target assignment (MOMTA) problem at the upper level and the time-optimal coordinated path planning (TOCPP) problems at the lower level. In order to solve the challenging problem, a recently proposed coordinated path planning method is employed to solve the TOCPP problems to achieve the soonest salvo attack against each target. With the aim of finding a more competent solver for MOMTA, three state-of-the-art multi-objective optimization methods (MOMs), namely NSGA-II, MOEA/D and DMOEA-εC, are adopted. Finally, a typical example is used to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method. A simple rule-based method is also employed for comparison. Comparative results show that DMOEA-εC is the best choice among the three MOMs for solving the MOMTA problem. The combination of DMOEA-εC for MOMTA and the coordinated path planning method for TOCPP can generate obviously better salvo attack schemes than the rule-based method.