Cooperative surveillance in the presence of time sensitive data

Abstract

We consider a cooperative vehicle routing problem for surveillance and reconnaissance missions using an aerial and a ground vehicle, where the collected data needs to be processed in real-time or near real-time. The proposed framework assumes that the ground vehicle has the ability to communicate long range and the aerial vehicle has limited communication range. The vehicles' paths are constrained such that the aerial vehicle remains in contact with the ground vehicle when the aerial vehicle is surveilling a target. Under this constraint, as the aerial vehicle collects data from the targets, this data can then be transmitted in real-time to the base station via the ground vehicle relay. We present a mixed-integer linear programming formulation and develop a branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the resulting cooperative routing problem involving the two vehicles. The novelty of the algorithm is the ability to maintain communication between the ground vehicle and UAV, while allowing the ground vehicle to move as the UAV is deployed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is corroborated through extensive computational experiments on several randomly generated instances.