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

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