Cooperated Routing Problem for Ground Vehicle and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: The Application on Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Missions

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel Two-Echelon Ground Vehicle and Its Mounted Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cooperated Routing Problem (2E-GUCRP). The 2E-GUCRP arises in the field of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Routing Problem such as those encountered in the context of city logistics. In a typical cooperated system, the UAV is launched from the Ground Vehicle (GV) and automatically flies to the designated target. Meanwhile, acting as a mobile base station, the GV can charge or change the UAV’s battery on the designated landing points to enable the UAV to continue its mission. The objective is to design efficient GV and UAV routes to minimize the total mission time while meeting the operational constraints. A Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model, which could be solved by commercial software, is constructed to describe this problem. In order to quickly solve the medium-scale problems, two existing heuristics to solve 2E-VRP are improved. The computational experiments are set up to compare our model with the 2E-VRP. The results indicate that the 2E-GUCRP obtains a better efficiency. Further discussion of the practical instance points out that the increase in efficiency is related to the speed relationship between the GV and the UAV.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Last-Mile Delivery Considering Backhauls

“…It usually takes more than 10 hours to solve two echelon vehicle routing problems with 9 customer nodes using an MILP model [35]. Therefore, heuristic methods are necessary to obtain solutions with a large number of customer nodes.…”

“…This heuristic is called the modified clustering-based (MCB) heuristic in this paper. Closely located nodes are clustered together, and neighborhood search is conducted with the degree of proximity and the number of clusters [35]. For a fair comparison with the ADA heuristic, the MCB heuristic uses the greedy algorithm [40] to solve the TSP with GV nodes as implemented in the ADA heuristic.…”