Dynamic Task-Chain Reconfiguration for Cooperative Counter-UAV Defense via Multi-Agent LLM-Based Heuristic Design

Abstract

The growing affordability, autonomy, and swarming of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) turn low-altitude defense from single-shot interception into a multi-node cooperative decision problem, in which the loss of sensing, coordination, or engagement nodes breaks the closed loops linking them. This study formulates their recovery as the dynamic reconfiguration of cooperative counter-UAV task chains. Given a pre-disturbance plan and a set of failed defending nodes, reconfiguration is modeled as a constrained bi-objective optimization balancing recovered engagement effectiveness against the change to the baseline plan and is solved by Multi-Agent Heuristic Evolution (MAHE), an automated heuristic design framework whose evolution, coordinator, repair, and reflection agents—driven by a large language model—evolve scoring heuristics for a fixed reconfiguration solver. Across instances of varying scale and under light-to-heavy node loss conditions, MAHE outperforms both a single-agent heuristic design counterpart and a range of hand-crafted solvers: on ten held-out test instances spanning 8–320 targets it attains the highest overall normalized hypervolume (0.947, versus 0.935 for the single-agent counterpart and 0.30–0.45 for the hand-crafted solvers) and the best mean rank (1.43 of six methods, p<10−5); the hand-crafted solvers lose most of their solution quality as the problem grows, whereas MAHE preserves it and sustains high recovery at a nearly constant reconfiguration cost. An ablation confirms that its agents contribute complementary gains. These simulation results indicate that automatically generated, reconfiguration-specific heuristics offer a scalable algorithmic foundation for dynamic, heterogeneous, and constraint-intensive counter-UAV task-chain reconfiguration.