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A Two-Stage Approach for Routing Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Stochastic Fuel Consumption

Journal Article · · Sensors
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3390/s18113756· OSTI ID:1483552
 [1];  [2];  [3]
  1. Wayne State Univ., Detroit, MI (United States). Dept. of Industrial and Systems Engineering
  2. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  3. Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States). Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
+ Show Author Affiliations

The past decade has seen a substantial increase in the use of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both civil and military applications. This article addresses an important aspect of refueling in the context of routing multiple small UAVs to complete a surveillance or data collection mission. Specifically, this article formulates a multiple-UAV routing problem with the refueling constraint of minimizing the overall fuel consumption for all the vehicles as a two-stage stochastic optimization problem with uncertainty associated with the fuel consumption of each vehicle. The two-stage model allows for the application of sample average approximation (SAA). Although the SAA solution asymptotically converges to the optimal solution for the two-stage model, the SAA run time can be prohibitive for medium- and large-scale test instances. Hence, we develop a tabu search-based heuristic that exploits the model structure while considering the uncertainty in fuel consumption. Extensive computational experiments corroborate the benefits of the two-stage model compared to a deterministic model and the effectiveness of the heuristic for obtaining high-quality solutions.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE; LANL Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program
Grant/Contract Number:
89233218CNA000001
OSTI ID:
1483552
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-18-29794
Journal Information:
Sensors, Journal Name: Sensors Journal Issue: 11 Vol. 18; ISSN 1424-8220
Publisher:
MDPI AGCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Cited By (2)

Heuristics for Two Depot Heterogeneous Unmanned Vehicle Path Planning to Minimize Maximum Travel Cost journal May 2019
A Survey of Recent Extended Variants of the Traveling Salesman and Vehicle Routing Problems for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles journal August 2019

Figures / Tables (10)

Figure 1(p. 3)figure Figure 1
Table 1(p. 5)table Table 1
Figure 2(p. 14)figure Figure 2
Table 2(p. 14)table Table 2
Table 3(p. 15)table Table 3
Table 4(p. 15)table Table 4
Table 4: Cont'd(p. 16)table Table 4: Cont'd
Table 5(p. 16)table Table 5
Figure 3(p. 17)figure Figure 3
Figure 4(p. 17)figure Figure 4

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Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
fuel constraints
sample average approximation
tabu search
two-stage stochastic optimization
unmanned aerial vehicles
vehicle routing