Fast Surrogate Learning for Multi-Objective UAV Placement in Motorway Intelligent Transportation System

TL;DR

This paper introduces fast surrogate models for multi-objective UAV placement in motorway ITS, enabling real-time deployment decisions that balance coverage, link quality, and UAV count, validated against a comprehensive benchmark.

Contribution

It presents a reproducible benchmark and permutation-invariant models that approximate Pareto-optimal UAV placements efficiently, advancing real-time multi-objective optimization in ITS.

Findings

Permutation-invariant models outperform others in coverage--SNR--UAV count trade-off.

Surrogate models approach NSGA-II Pareto quality with much faster inference.

Models provide better success--latency trade-offs than heuristics under shared budgets.

Abstract

We address multi-objective unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) placement for motorway intelligent transportation systems, where deployments must balance coverage, link quality, and UAV count under geometric constraints. We construct a reproducible benchmark from highD motorway recordings with recording-level splits and generate Pareto-optimal labels via NSGA-II. A preference rule yields deployable targets while preserving multi-objective evaluation. We train fast surrogate models that map unordered vehicle positions to UAV count and continuous placements, using permutation-aware losses and constraint-regularized training across set-based and sequence-based architectures. The evaluation protocol combines Pareto quality metrics, success-rate curves, runtime benchmarks, and robustness studies, with uncertainty quantified by recording-level bootstrap. Results indicate that permutation-invariant set models provide the strongest coverage--SNR--count trade-off among learned predictors and approach NSGA-II quality while enabling real-time inference. Under shared budgets, they offer a more favorable success--latency trade-off than heuristic baselines. The benchmark, splits are released to support reproducible ITS deployment studies and to facilitate comparisons under shared operational budgets.