An artificial bee colony algorithm for solving the weapon target assignment problem

Abstract

In this paper, we deal with the static weapon target assignment (WTA) problem which is a hard combinatorial optimization problem having some industrial applications. The aim of the WTA problem is to find an assignment of weapons to targets with the minimum total survival value of the targets. The WTA problem is known to be NP-complete problem. In this paper, we propose a novel artificial bee algorithm to give an efficient solution to the WTA problem. We test the proposed algorithm with benchmark problem instances and compare it with some other meta-heuristics in the literature. Computational tests show that our algorithm is competitive. © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.