Abstract
In a military surface-based air defence environment, a fire control officer typically employs a computerised weapon assignment decision support subsystem to aid him in the assignment of available surface-based weapon systems to engage aerial threats in an attempt to protect defended surface assets - a problem known in the military operations research literature as the weapon assignment problem. In this paper, a tri-objective, dynamic weapon assignment model is proposed by modelling the weapon assignment problem as a multi-objective variation of the celebrated vehicle routing problem with time windows. A multi-objective, evolutionary metaheuristic for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows is used to solve the model. The workability of this modelling approach is illustrated by solving the model in the context of a simulated, surface-based air defence scenario.
Highlights
In the context of a military surface-based air defence (SBAD) environment, weapon assignment (WA) entails the assignment of available surface-based1 weapon systems (WSs) by a human operator, known as a fire control officer, to engage aerial threats based on some pre-specified set of suitability criteria, in an attempt to neutralise these threats — a problem which is known in the military operations research literature as the Weapon Assignment Problem (WAP) [26]
It was suggested that the WA system should be designed in such a way that the fire control officer is able to configure a single Weapon Assignment Model (WAM) from one of these model classes to furnish him with WS-threat assignment pair proposals
Enemy aircraft travel through the defended airspace to reach the Defended Assets (DAs) allows for very small time frames during which fire control officers must make WS-threat pair assignment decisions
Summary
In the context of a military surface-based air defence (SBAD) environment, weapon assignment (WA) entails the assignment of available surface-based weapon systems (WSs) by a human operator, known as a fire control officer, to engage aerial threats based on some pre-specified set of suitability criteria, in an attempt to neutralise these threats — a problem which is known in the military operations research literature as the Weapon Assignment Problem (WAP) [26]. In 2014, Lotter and Van Vuuren [19] put forward a generic framework for the design of such a decision support system This framework provides for a so-called Weapon Assignment Model (WAM) component in which four different classes of mathematical assignment models reside, ranging in different levels of complexity. It was suggested that the WA system should be designed in such a way that the fire control officer is able to configure a single WAM from one of these model classes to furnish him with WS-threat assignment pair proposals. The term dynamic refers to the class of WA models in which suitable future time instants are sought at which to assign a subset of the available WSs to the threats observed [29]. A discussion of the model results and conclusions in the context of this worked example follows, and the paper closes, in §6, with ideas for possible future work
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