Energy management and balance strategy for underwater glider fleet with VMD-SSA-LSSVM model and central type double-level framework

Abstract

The management of energy has gained enormous attention as an efficient way to prolong the endurance of unmanned vehicle fleet. During ocean observation and exploration, the variation of the equipped sensor will cause uneven energy consumption for different underwater gliders (UGs), which will lead to the premature accomplishment of the planned mission. Therefore, a novel energy management and balance strategy for the UG fleet is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a new VMD-SSA-LSSVM model is presented to predict the energy consumption of UG based on sea trial data acquired in the northern South China Sea. Besides, the prediction results are compared with those of other benchmark methods and proved their effectiveness. Afterwards, a novel central type double-level framework is established based on low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy protocol to balance the energy of UG fleet, and double-level managing strategies are provided for minor or major energy adjustment based on the energy consumption model. Then the simulation is carried out to verify the effect on different sizes of UG fleet with energy balancing strategy, and the observation efficiency is defined and quantified by many indexes comprehensively. Finally, the simulated results with real data of UG fleet are given, verifying that the energy balance strategy could prolong the endurance by about 4.6% and improve the observation efficiency by about 7%.