Tabu search for target-radar assignment (Q2731678)

The authors are dealing with a (near) realtime decision making problem: The assignment of defense missiles to a couple of targets in a rapidly changing environment. The question is: Can metaheuristics be useful under this hard time constraints? For this reason the problem first is modelled as a nonlinear-mixed integer problem. To solve this problem a two-stage process is proposed: in the first step the assignment of targets is made, in the second step the choice of start times within a small interval is done. For the first step some neighbourhood-based metaheuristics are implemented, the second step was realized by a steepest ascent (greedy) heuristic.NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEBy a log of experiments it turned out that a specifically tailored tabu search algorithm performs well, even with respect to strong time criteria.