Constrained Weapon–Target Assignment: Enhanced Very Large Scale Neighborhood Search Algorithm

Abstract

Optimization problems solved using very large scale neighborhood (VLSN) search algorithms include scheduling problems, the capacitated minimum spanning tree problem, the traveling salesman problem, and weapon-target assignment (WTA). This correspondence paper presents an enhanced VLSN search algorithm for obtaining feasible solutions and constructing improvement graphs. This enhanced VLSN search algorithm solves the constrained WTA (CWTA) problem, in which the number of interceptors available to each weapon and the number of interceptors allowed to fire at each target have upper bounds. The proposed enhanced VLSN search algorithm can solve a CWTA problem with 100 targets and 100 weapons (where the upper bound on the number of interceptors for each weapon is one and both the lower and upper bounds on the number of interceptors for each target are equal to one) within an average of 3 s. This study demonstrates that the proposed Enhanced VLSN is superior to existing approaches.