A Hybrid Genetic Algorithm Applied to Weapon-Target Assignment Problem

Abstract

In this paper, a hybrid genetic algorithm by combining a genetic algorithm with an immune system is proposed and applied to weapon-target assignment (WTA) problem. The WTA problem, known as a NP-Complete problem, is to find a proper assignment of weapons to targets with the objective of minimizing the expected damage of own-force asset. The used immune system serves as a local search mechanism for genetic algorithm. Besides, in our implementation, a new crossover operator called the elite preserving crossover is proposed to preserve good information contained in the chromosome. A comparison of the proposed algorithm with several existing search approaches shows that the proposed algorithm outperforms its competitors on all tested WTA problems.