Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2023, Vol. 34 ›› Issue (1): 81-98.doi: 10.23919/JSEE.2023.000005

• SYSTEMS ENGINEERING • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Joint mission and route planning of unmanned air vehicles via a learning-based heuristic

Jianmai SHI(), Jiaming ZHANG, Hongtao LEI, Zhong LIU, Rui WANG()   

  1. 1 College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
  • Received:2021-02-15 Online:2023-02-18 Published:2023-03-03
  • Contact: Rui WANG E-mail:jshi1980@163.com;ruiwangnudt@gmail.com
  • About author:
    SHI Jianmai was born in 1980. He received his Ph.D. degree in management science and engineering from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), Changsha, China, in 2011. During 2008 to 2009, he was a visiting Ph.D. student with the University of Windsor, Canada. During 2014 to 2015, he was a visiting scholar at McGill University. He is now the professor at the College of System Engineering, NUDT, Changsha, China. His current research interests include vehicle routing, supply chain management and heuristic design. E-mail: jshi1980@163.com

    ZHANG Jiaming was born in 1982. He received his B.S. degree in communication command from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), Changsha, China, in 2004. From 2004 to 2008, he was a commanding officer in combat troops. He received his M.S. degree in military training from NUDT, in 2010. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in management science and engineering at NUDT. His current research interests include task assignment, mission planning and supply chain management. E-mail: zjm08091018@163.com

    LEI Hongtao was born in 1982. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in management science and engineering from National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China, in 2004, 2006, and 2011, respectively. He was an academic visitor of CIRRELT with the University of Montreal, Canada, from 2009 to 2010. He is currently an associate professor with the College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology. His research interests include resilient energy system planning, and microgrid robust design and optimization. E-mail: hongtaolei@aliyun.com

    LIU Zhong was born in 1968. He received his Ph.D. degree in management science from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), Changsha, China, in 2000. He is currently a professor with NUDT. He is also the vice-dean with the College of Systems Engineering Laboratory, NUDT, and a senior advisor with the Research Center for Computational Experiments and Parallel Systems, NUDT. His main research interests include planning systems, computational organization, and intelligent systems. E-mail: liuzhong@nudt.edu.cn

    WANG Rui was born in 1986 He received his B.S. degree from National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China, in 2008, and Ph.D. degree from the University of Sheffield, U.K. in 2013. He is currently an associate professor at the NUDT. His main research interests include evolutionary computation, multi-objective optimization, machine learning, optimization methods on energy internet network. E-mail: ruiwangnudt@gmail.com
  • Supported by:
    This work was supportes by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (71771215; 62122093).

Abstract:

Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) have been regularly employed in modern wars to conduct different missions. Instead of addressing mission planning and route planning separately, this study investigates the issue of joint mission and route planning for a fleet of UAVs. The mission planning determines the configuration of weapons in UAVs and the weapons to attack targets, while the route planning determines the UAV’s visiting sequence for the targets. The problem is formulated as an integer linear programming model. Due to the inefficiency of CPLEX on large scale optimization problems, an effective learning-based heuristic, namely, population based adaptive large neighborhood search (P-ALNS), is proposed to solve the model. In P-ALNS, seven neighborhood structures are designed and adaptively utilized in terms of their historical performance. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model and algorithm are demonstrated on test instances of small, medium and large sizes. In particular, P-ALNS achieves comparable solutions or as good as those of CPLEX on small-size (20 targets) instances in much shorter time.

Key words: unmanned air vehicle (UAV), mission planning, routing, adaptive large neighborhood search