A Study of population Initialization Method to improve a Genetic Algorithm on the Weapon Target Allocation problem

The Weapon Target Allocation(WTA) problem is the NP-Complete problem. The WTA problem is that the threatful air targets are assigned by weapon of allies for killing the targets. A good solution of NP-complete problem is heuristic algorithms. Genetic algorithms are commonly used heuristic for global optimization, and it is good solution on the diverse problem domain. But there has been very little research done on the generation of their initial population. The initialization of population is one of the GA step, and it decide to initial value of individuals. In this paper, we propose to the population initialization method to improve a Genetic Algorithm. When it initializes population, the proposed algorithm reflects the characteristics of the WTA problem domain, and inherits the dominant gene. In addition, the search space widely spread in the problem space to find efficiently the good quality solution. In this paper, the proposed algorithm to verify performance examine that an analysis of various properties and the experimental results by analyzing the performance compare to other algorithms. The proposed algorithm compared to the other initialization methods and a general genetic algorithm. As a result, the proposed algorithm showed better performance in WTA problem than the other algorithms. In particular, the proposed algorithm is a good way to apply to the variety of situation WTA problem domain, because the proposed algorithm can be applied flexibly to WTA problem by the adjustment of RMI.