Optimizing Mission Times for Multiple Unmanned Vehicles with Vehicle-Target Assignment Constraints
Sivakumar Rathinam, Hari Rajagopal · AIAA SCITECH 2022 Forum · 2022
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-2527.vid This paper addresses a mission planning problem involving a team of unmanned vehicles located at a single depot location. Given a set of target locations, the problem aims to find a tour for each vehicle such that each target is visited at least once by some vehicle, each vehicle's tour starts and ends at the depot, and the time when the last vehicle returns to the depot is minimized. The key feature that differentiates our problem with the prior work is that we also consider vehicle-target constraints which does not allow a vehicle to visit any target. As the mission planning problem is NP-Hard, we resort to first developing simple heuristics to find a feasible solution and then improve the feasible solution using general variable neighbourhood search heuristics. Preliminary simulation results are also presented to quantify the improvements offered by the heuristics.