Solving Weapon-Target Assignment Problems by Cultural Particle Swarm Optimization

The weapon-target assignment is a very complicated problem and a key point in the warship formations' air defense operation. In this paper, a cultural particle swarm optimization algorithm for solving WTA problems is proposed. The general idea of the proposed algorithm is to combine the advantages of PSO which integrates local search and global search scheme possesses high search efficiency, and that of cultural algorithm which combines the search method with the knowledge representation scheme for collecting and reasoning knowledge about individual experience to avoid premature convergence. An example is used to verify the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed cultural PSO algorithm, comparing with both the traditional PSO method and the genetic algorithm method. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has rapid convergence speed and higher solution precision.