Tomahawk Land Attack Missile Predesignation: Optimization Revisited

Abstract : The Tomahawk Land-Attack Missile (TLAM) is the long-range precision weapon of choice in strike warfare against strategic targets for U.S. military forces. Predesignation is the process of determining which ship or submarine will fire which TLAM missiles in support of an authorized attack upon specified targets. This thesis revisits the mathematical models and algorithms developed by previous NPS faculty and students to optimally conduct the allocation of TLAMs to firing units. We incorporate all the problem specifications addressed by previous heuristic algorithms for the problem, and compare our results to those in publicly available test cases. We show that our models can be solved optimally in affordable time for most of the cases and make provisions to establish accurate bounds in the other cases.