The Weapon Target Assignment Problem: Rational Inference of Adversary Target Utility Valuations from Observed Solutions

Identifying an adversary’s strategic goals and values requires deliberate and unbiased analysis. This research is motivated by the premise that, if one observes an adversary’s actions or planned actions, it is possible to draw reasonable inferences about their values, thereby reducing misperceptions and informing better decisions. Within the context of the static weapon target assignment problem, this research develops and empirically compares alternative methods to rationalize an adversary’s value hierarchy over targets that informs their observed decisions. Such methods either identify the extreme points of a polytope within a unit simplex of relative target values that encompasses all possible relative target values based on a weak dominance criterion or a subset of points within the polytope. This research characterizes the solution methods’ practical tractability for use on larger-sized problems and their generalizability to other problems. Even for the superlative technique examined, testing illustrates the computationally challenging nature of identifying the defining polytope of relative target values, and the work concludes with suggestions for metaheuristic technique development.