Dynamic Network Flow Optimization Models for Air Vehicle Resource Allocation

A weapon system consisting of a swarm of air vehicles whose mission is to search for, classify, attack, and perform battle damage assessment, is considered. It is assumed that the target field information is communicated to all the elements of the swarm as it becomes available. A network flow optimization problem is posed whose readily obtained solution yields the optimum resource allocation among the air vehicles in the swarm. Hence, the periodic reapplication of the centralized optimization algorithm yields the benefit of cooperative feedback control.