Efficient route planning for an unmanned air vehicle deployed on a moving carrier

Abstract

Vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a constrained extension of the well-known traveling salesman problem (TSP). Emerging from the current conceptual trends in operations field, a new constraint to be included to the existing VRP parameters is the depot mobility. A practical example of such a problem is planning a route for an Unmanned air vehicle (UAV) deployed on a mobile platform to visit fixed targets. Furthermore, the range constraint of the UAV becomes another constraint within this sample case as well. In this paper, we define new VRP variants by introducing depot mobility (Mobile Depot VRP: MoDVRP) and extending it with capacity constraint (Capacitated MoDVRP: C-MoDVRP). As a sample use case, we study route planning for a UAV deployed on a moving carrier. To deal with the C-MoDVRP, we propose a Genetic Algorithm that is adapted to satisfy the constraints of depot mobility and range, while maximizing the number of targets visited by the UAV. To examine the success of our approach, we compare the individual performances of our proposed genetic operators with conventional ones and the performance of our overall solution with the Nearest Neighbor and Hill Climbing heuristics, on some well-known TSP benchmark problems, and receive successful results.