Optimal Weapon Target Assignment Based on an Geometric Approach*

In this paper, dynamic weapon target assignment is proposed for area air defence. The focus of this study is to optimally protect a convoy of friendly assets from oncoming targets whose manoeuvres are hard to be predicted. The earliest geometry provides a boundary of the intercept region without prediction of target manoeuvre. If any of friendly asset is located in this region, this asset might be destroyed by the targets. Therefore, the safety margin can be defined as the minimum distance between the earliest geometry and friendly asset. This safety margin naturally copes with the unpredictability of the target manoeuvre. In many-on-many engagement scenarios, the safety margin changes in accordance with allocation policies and it is closely related to the performance of the area air defence system. Thus, we formulate an optimal assignment problem using the safety margin and introduce an optimisation approach. The proposed optimisation method integrates the evolutionary game and particle swarm optimisation in order to improve the optimality as well as to reduce computational load. The performance of the proposed scheme for weapon target assignment is evaluated by non-linear simulations.