Optimized and Rapid Employment of Loitering Weapons in Response to Fires

ALPHATECH proposes to develop a tool addressing the unique planning needs of the tactical Tomahawk weapon system. Using an innovative combination of optimization techniques, this tool will generate cruise missile strike plans - missile trajectories andtarget coverage schedules - and generate new plans in response to in-flight retargeting needs. We will accomplish this by formulating the flight path construction problem as an approximate dynamic program, incrementally building missile trajectories. Theuse of a single, global optimization will produce synchronized strike plans which provide maximal target coverage - coverage which is shared across the set of missiles. This initial strike plan will include (1) missile routes, and (2) target feasibilityschedules which describe (for each missile) those targets to which a missile may be diverted, and the associated timing constraints. From this plan foundation, we will develop weapon assignment algorithms that optimize the allocation of missiles totargets following a time-critical call for fire, or other retargeting event. Upon the solution of this weapon-target pairing sub-problem, we will re-optimize remaining missile trajectories to reallocate our coverage of any outstanding targets.Implementation of this methodology will provide strike planners with a robust planning and re-planning tool for the tactical Tomahawk weapon system.