Routing Problems for Reconnaissance Patrolling Missions

摘要

This article introduces routing problems that arise in reconnaissance patrolling missions, where the focus is on improving the fidelity of information gathered from targets. The general problem is a multi-stage stochastic program where at each stage, additional nearby satellite targets might have to be visited to collect more information depending on the uncertainty associated with the information gathered from the original targets. In this paper, a preliminary two-stage version of a simple variant of the general problem is formulated and solved. Statistical bounds on the quality of the solution obtained for the two-stage problem are computed and the approach is compared with a deterministic counterpart. Finally, a plethora of relevant problem variants and future research directions are discussed.