Assessing the robustness of UAV assignments

Abstract

The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is increasingly commonplace. UAVs support military forces by flying over dangerous zones mainly for surveillance missions. Route planning for UAVs is therefore a critical problem. With many side constraints such as visitation time requirements, mission priorities, and vehicle capabilities, route planning is a hard problem. Heuristic approaches have therefore been developed to construct near optimal routes. Given the hostile operating conditions, however, robustness of these plans is emerging as a more significant concern than optimality. This paper thus investigates the robustness of constructed UAV routes. To this end, a greedy assignment algorithm that takes into consideration physical constraints and operational risks is used to construct UAV tours. The sensitivity of these tours to various operational parameters such as mission threat level, weather risk, and crash rates as well as their interactions is assessed in a simulation study through a set of designed experiments.