Framework for Automated Target Engagement Scheduling (FATES)

In the ever-evolving landscape of modern naval warfare, maritime forces require increasingly sophisticated combat systems to successfully engage and destroy air and missile threats across multiple defense layers. As our adversaries continue to make rapid advancements in missile technology, our traditional systems for defending against such potential assaults are becoming challenged. The launch sequences, trajectories, electronic countermeasures (ECMs), and movement capabilities of incoming threats are often uncertain and thus require quick and decisive action to thoroughly neutralize. For example, some state-of-the-art hypersonic weapons such as glide vehicles (HGVs) and cruise missiles can travel at speeds up to Mach 20 in the lower atmosphere while maneuvering en route to their intended target. Additionally, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an evolving threat and these drones often travel in swarms and thus can be difficult to successfully track and engage. Currently, the Navy’s Ship Self-Defense System (SSDS) relies on explicit solutions to generate weapon-target assignment (WTA) schedules in the face of incoming strikes. While adequate for known threat types, such techniques may not be sufficient for more complex engagements. Given these challenges, it is imperative to develop an automatic assignment system for the SSDS which maximizes weapon scheduling efficiency and success against incoming target raids when explicit results are not viable. To this end, ExoAnalytic Solutions proposes to create the Framework for Automated Target Engagement Scheduling (FATES). The first element of this formulation is the Weapon-Target Graph Database which captures known and uncertain interconnected weapon-target data. A key feature of this database is its ability to represent uncertainty in the data and make probabilistic inferences. The second component of FATES is the Weapon-Target Opportunity Evaluator which queries the database in real-time, dynamically calculates the shot opportunities, predicts the effectiveness of each weapon-target pair, and updates the Graph Database. The third component of FATES is the Weapon-Target Assignment Model which itself consists of two parts: the problem formulation and optimization method. The problem formulation establishes the objective function to be minimized subject to mission objectives and resource constraints while the optimization algorithm determines the optimal solution. Such results guide the SSDS engagement schedule and aid in optimizing the SSDS weapon deployment timeline to maximize ship survivability.