Research on Dynamic Weapon Target Assignment Based on Cross-Entropy

The weapon target assignment (WTA) is a classical problem of defense-related applications which is proved to be a NP-complete problem. In this paper, a practical and available dynamic weapon target assignment (DWTA) formulation is given which incorporates two meaningful and conflicting objectives, that is, minimizing weapon costs and maximizing combat benefits. As we know, heuristic methods have some shortcomings such as slow convergence speed and local optimum in solving the nonlinear integer optimization problem. To this end, a novel DWTA algorithm based on cross-entropy (CE) method is introduced, where the resources requirement condition for targets is taken into consideration. The CE method associates an estimation problem with the DWTA optimization problem, and then, the estimation problem is transformed into a convex optimization problem. The Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions are applied to solve the convex optimization problem, and the iteration formulas to find the optimal solution are deducted. Furthermore, in order to verify the performance of CE method in dealing with the DWTA problem, several simulations in different combat scenarios are implemented. The results reveal that, compared with the benchmark heuristic and Monte-Carlo (MC) methods, there are some notable advantages in solving the DWTA problem based on CE method with regard to the solution quality and time consumption.