Solving Large‐Scale Weapon Target Assignment Problems in Seconds Using Branch‐Price‐And‐Cut
Name
Naval Research Logistics - 2025 - Bertsimas - Solving Large‐Scale Weapon Target Assignment Problems in Seconds Using.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.14 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8724d59b2865bb9b4e45be912b9c1bbb
Author(s)
Bertsimas, Dimitris
Paskov, Alex
Date Issued
January 27, 2025
Journal
Naval Research Logistics (NRL)
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Bertsimas, D. and Paskov, A. (2025), Solving Large-Scale Weapon Target Assignment Problems in Seconds Using Branch-Price-And-Cut. Naval Research Logistics, 72: 735-749.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This paper proposes a framework based on branch-price-and-cut to solve the weapon target assignment (WTA) problem, a popularclass of non-linear assignment problems that has received significant attention over the past several decades. We first reformulatethe WTA into a form amenable to column generation and then derive efficient algorithms for initializing the column generation,solving the pricing problem, generating clique cuts, and managing the branch-and-bound. Through significant experimentation,we display the framework’s efficiency – which scales to solve problems with 10000 targets and weapons on a laptop and exactlysolves problems in seconds, which previously took hours to solve. We also discuss extensions to common WTA variants and moregeneral non-linear assignment problems in hopes of motivating algorithmic developments.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/nav.22249
