A Framework for Planning Multiple Paths in Free Space

Path planning, a topic of much interest in military planning, is largely treated as the task of finding the best path with respect to some criterion such as length, travel time, etc, for which efficient algorithms are already available. Military planning requires understanding enemy intentions and devising unexpected plans to fox the enemy which calls for not a best path, but a number of alternative paths. We study the problem of computing multiple paths with different properties, such as all paths with at most L loops, in free space among polygonal obstacles using a framework of Voronoi diagram. The complexity of the algorithms have been analyzed. We show that the Voronoi diagram, though widely used, is inadequate to represent certain important properties of representative paths in free space. Further, we show how this framework might be applied in three different military problems – entity reidentification, ambush analysis, and rapid re-routing in urban operations.