Assigning Nuclear Weapons with Reactive Tabu Search

• Published in: Military operations research (Alexandria, Va.) Va.), 2003-01, Vol.8 (1), p.57-69
• Main Authors: Cullenbine, Christopher A., Gallagher, Mark A., Moore, James T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bomber aircraft; Heuristics; Military operations; Military strategy; Nuclear research; Nuclear weapons; Operations research; Taboos; Tabu search; Weapons
• ISSN: 1082-5983; 2163-2758
• DOI: 10.5711/morj.8.1.57

United States Strategic Command developed the Weapon Assignment Model (WAM) to analyze potential future force structures and build the Red Integrated Strategic Offensive Plan (RISOP), a hypothetical Russian war plan for attacking the West. Typical problems modeled by WAM consider thousands of targets, warheads, and delivery systems including ballistic missiles with Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs) simultaneously launched against multiple targets. MIRV weapons are assigned to targets from a preplanned pool of thousands of operationally feasible groups of targets. Integer formulations of the weapon assignment problem often have tens of goals, half a million decision variables, and tens of thousands of constraints. The problem size warrants the use of heuristics to find good solutions. Tabu search obtains near optimal solutions to these problems. The solutions have excellent objective function values, generally within a small percent of the solution of the relaxed problem. We compare tabu search solutions with the current heuristic's solutions. We test a number of tabu search features including Reactive Tabu Search (RTS) and various intensification and diversification strategies. In this application, we find that RTS outperforms a tabu search with fixed tabu tenure. Tabu search's ability to quickly find good solutions to these nuclear targeting problems enables analysts to examine more alternatives for force structure and policy decisions. This research creates opportunities for flexible U. S. nuclear war responses. Since good solutions are found in less than half the flight-time of an attacking ballistic missile, tabu search provides an opportunity to revise a counter attack plan and incorporate the latest military intelligence. This approach could support a real-time retargeting capability based on the most current information.