Towards Cooperative Guidance in Air-Defense: Extending Weapon-Target Assignment into the Mid-Course Phase
Ole OSTERMANN, Johannes AUTENRIEB, Carsten SCHWARZ
Abstract. As modern threats evolve through coordinated swarm attacks, static or pre-launch assignments for air-defense systems become outdated mid-engagement, necessitating in-flight reassignment. Therefore, cooperative guidance is introduced, extending dynamic Weapon-Target Assignment (WTA) from launch-time coordination into the mid-course flight phase. A decentralized architecture is proposed that couples WTA with trajectory guidance via informed cost functions. The information consensus-based WTA optimization procedure enables real-time adaptability under communication constraints. The Hungarian algorithm is chosen for its deterministic, low-complexity performance for the repeated optimizations. A simulation example illustrates mid-course reassignment triggered by target maneuvering, demonstrating the feasibility of collaborative flight-path adaptation.
Keywords
Weapon-Target Assignment (WTA), Cooperative Guidance, Multi-Agent Systems, Online Task Assignment, Combinatorial Optimization, Missiles, Air-Defense
Published online 7/20/2026, 6 pages
Copyright © 2026 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA
Citation: Ole OSTERMANN, Johannes AUTENRIEB, Carsten SCHWARZ, Towards Cooperative Guidance in Air-Defense: Extending Weapon-Target Assignment into the Mid-Course Phase, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 69, pp 771-776, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644904251-136
The article was published as article 136 of the book CEAS – AIDAA Conference 2025
Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
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