Towards Cooperative Guidance in Air-Defense: Extending Weapon-Target Assignment into the Mid-Course Phase

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threats evolve through coordinated swarm attacks, static or pre-launch assignments for air-defense systems become outdated mid-engagement, necessitating in-flight reassignment.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.