Adiabatic Quantum Computing for Solving the Weapon Target Assignment Problem

Quantum computing promises significant improvements of computation capabilities in various fields such as machine learning and complex optimization problems. Recent technological advancements suggest that the adiabatic quantum computing ansatz may soon see practical applications. In this work, we adopt this computation paradigm to develop a quantum computation based solver of the well–known weapon target assignment problem, an NP-hard nonlinear integer programming optimization task. The feasibility of the presented model is demonstrated by numerical simulation of the adiabatic evolution of a system of quantum bits towards the optimal solution encoded in the model Hamiltonian. Overall, the described method is not limited to the context of weapon management but is, with slight modifications to the model Hamiltonian, applicable to relevant problems in data fusion, for example sensor allocation and multi-target data association in tracking applications.