Multi-Hypothesis Contingency Driven Targeting

Missile defense systems will always require a real-time weapon/target pairing capability. Although extensive preplanning can give the defender general guidance for a variety of enemy courses of action, the combinatorial explosion of possible ways an engagement can evolve makes explicit enumeration of all possible defensive responses to enemy actions impossible. Ultimately, allocation of interceptors to threat tracks and generation of a feasible launch and intercept schedule are jobs that the defender must perform during an engagement, not beforehand. The absence of an operational weapon/target pairing capability in the current and next planned version of the C2BMC manifests itself as a complicated optimization problem that must be solved in real-time by the human operators. Under Phase I of this SBIR, the DAC team has applied a break-through optimization technique to the weapon/target pairing problem that generates excellent weapon/target pairing solutions in real-time, and does so within the context of the current branch of the defense plan. By developing weapon/target pairing solutions in that are aligned with the defense plan, DAC’s algorithm is able to exploit the extensive and thorough analysis on which the plan is built while remaining flexible enough to address unanticipated situations.