Optimal Threshold Policy for Sequential Weapon Target Assignment

Authors

Krishnamoorthy Kalyanam
Sivakumar Rathinam
David W. Casbeer, Air Force Research Laboratory
Meir Pachter, Air Force Institute of TechnologyFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Abstract

We investigate a variant of the classical Weapon Target Assignment (WTA) problem, wherein N targets are sequentially visited by a bomber carrying M homogenous weapons. We are interested in the optimal assignment of weapons to targets. A weapon launched by the bomber destroys the j^th target with probability p_j and upon successful elimination, the bomber earns a positive reward r_j. There is feedback in that the bomber, upon deploying a weapon, is notified whether or not it successfully destroyed the target. Whereupon, it decides whether to move on to the next target or allocate an additional weapon to the current target. We provide a tractable solution method for computing the optimal closed loop control policy that results in maximal expected total reward. Moreover, we show that a thresholding policy is optimal, wherein a weapon from an inventory of k weapons is dropped on the j^th target iff k exceeds a stage dependent threshold value, κ(j).
Abstract © IFAC.

Comments

The "Link to Full Text" button on this page loads the open access version of record for the article, hosted at Elsevier. The Copyright of articles submitted to IFAC before October 1, 2019, belongs to IFAC. The full text of these articles is publicly available on ScienceDirect. © 2016 International Federation of Automatic Control

DOI

10.1016/j.ifacol.2016.09.002

Source Publication

IFAC-PapersOnLine

Recommended Citation

Kalyanam, K., Rathinam, S., Casbeer, D. W., & Pachter, M. (2016). Optimal threshold policy for sequential weapon target assignment. IFAC-PapersOnLine, 49(17), 7–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2016.09.002