Cooperative Routing for an Air-Ground Vehicle Team -- Exact Algorithm, Transformation Method, and Heuristics

TL;DR

This paper introduces an exact algorithm, a transformation method, and heuristics for cooperative routing of a ground vehicle and UAV under communication constraints, optimizing target visits for surveillance missions.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive framework with an exact branch-and-cut algorithm, a novel transformation method, and heuristics for solving a complex cooperative routing problem.

Findings

The branch-and-cut algorithm solves the problem to optimality.

The transformation method improves computational efficiency.

Heuristics provide near-optimal solutions quickly.

Abstract

This article considers a cooperative vehicle routing problem for an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission in the presence of communication constraints between the vehicles. The proposed framework uses a ground vehicle and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that travel cooperatively and visit a set of targets while satisfying the communication constraints. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program, and a branch-and-cut algorithm is developed to solve the problem to optimality. Furthermore, a transformation method and a heuristic are also developed for the problem. The effectiveness of all the algorithms is corroborated through extensive computational experiments on several randomly generated instances.