A column generation approach for optimized routing and coordination of a UAV fleet

摘要

Unmanned Aerial Vecicles (UAVs) in civil and military applications are becoming increasingly popular. Various platform types have already shown their great potential in missions that require rapid surveillance capabilities or logistic support. Large scale incidents require the deployment of several platforms with various capabilities. In this case, coordinated use will lead to more efficient use of the given resources. Problems to resolve resemble known optimization problems from the field of vehicle routing or scheduling. The problem considered in this work includes a given team of homogenous UAVs and a set of target locations with certain requests that need to be served. It is modeled as a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) that is known to be NP hard, i.e. until now no algorithm is known that can solve the problem in polynomial run-time. In this paper, the problem is formulated using a path flow formulation and a column generation algorithm has been implemented and tested to solve simulated realtime instances of the problem in suitable time*.