A quantum algorithm for solving weapon target assignment problem

Quantum computers, known to have the potential for exponential speedup in solving some problems due to their superposition property, are expected to facilitate the solution of NP-hard optimisation problems. This study proposes a quantum algorithm to solve the weapon target assignment problem (WTAP), one of the NP-hard optimisation problems. The proposed quantum algorithm is a gate-based approach, and scenario examples are executed on Qiskit quantum computing platform and IBM Lima quantum computer with Falcon r4T processor type. The results manifest that the proposed quantum algorithm has low space and time complexity, demonstrating its memory and computational resources efficiency.