Routing a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles: a trajectory optimisation-based matheuristic

Pereira Coutinho, Walton, Fliege, Joerg, Battarra, Maria and Subramanian, Anand (2018) Routing a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles: a trajectory optimisation-based matheuristic

Abstract

This paper deals with a GRTOP that arises in the context of disaster assessment. We consider the problem where, in the aftermath of a disaster, a fleet of aerial gliders is required to photograph a number of waypoints (points of interest such as hospitals, schools and residential areas) and land in one of the available landing sites while optimising some performance criteria subject to operational constraints and flight dynamics. In our case, we aim at balancing the duration of the routes by minimising the maximum route flight time. To efficiently solve this GRTOP, we propose a hybrid method that is composed of two main building blocks: (i) a STO heuristic, designed to cope with the very challenging task of finding feasible (flyable) trajectories for a given route; and (ii) a routing matheuristic, capable of generating routes that can be evaluated by the STO procedure, that combines iterated local search and a set-partitioning-based integer programming formulation. The proposed algorithm was tested in randomly generated instances with up to 50 waypoints and it was capable of quickly finding feasible solutions.

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Contributors

Author: Joerg Fliege

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