A Time-Indexed Generalized Vehicle Routing Model and Stabilized Column Generation for Military Aircraft Mission Planning

We introduce a time-indexed mixed-integer linear programming model for a military aircraft mission planning problem, where a fleet of cooperating aircraft should attack a number of ground targets so that the total expected effect is maximized. The model is a rich vehicle routing problem and the direct application of a general solver is practical only for scenarios of very moderate sizes. We propose a Dantzig–Wolfe reformulation and column generation approach. A column here represents a specific sequence of tasks at certain times for an aircraft, and to generate columns a longest path problem with side constraints is solved. We compare the column generation approach with the time-indexed model with respect to upper bounding quality of their linear programming relaxations and conclude that the former provides a much stronger formulation of the problem.