A multi-objective sparse evolutionary framework for large-scale weapon target assignment based on a reward strategy

Abstract

The asset-based weapon target assignment (ABWTA) problem is one of the important branches of the weapon target assignment (WTA) problem. Due to the current large-scale battlefield environment, the ABWTA problem is a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) with strong constraints, large-scale and sparse properties. The novel model of the ABWTA problem with the operation error parameter is established. An evolutionary algorithm for large-scale sparse problems (SparseEA) is introduced as the main framework for solving large-scale sparse ABWTA problem. The proposed framework (SparseEA-ABWTA) mainly addresses the issue that problem-specific initialization method and genetic operators with a reward strategy can generate solutions efficiently considering the sparsity of variables and an improved non-dominated solution selection method is presented to handle the constraints. Under the premise of constructing large-scale cases by the specific case generator, two numerical experiments on four outstanding multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) show Runtime of SparseEA-ABWTA is faster nearly 50% than others under the same convergence and the gap between MOEAs improved by the mechanism of SparseEA-ABWTA and SparseEA-ABWTA is reduced to nearly 20% in the convergence and distribution.