Optimal routing, aborting and hitting strategies of UAVs executing hitting the targets considering the defense range of targets

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to investigate optimal routing, aborting and hitting strategies of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) executing hitting tasks. Several factors such as time window and a certain circular defense range of each target, the optimal bomb and fuel loads are considered in the UAVs routing plan in order to better assign targets to each UAV and determine the hitting order. It is assumed that UAVs may be attacked by random shocks when they are within the target's defense range, so each UAV can choose to abort its task according to the number of targets that the UAV has hit and the number of shocks that UAV has suffered in order to reduce the probability of UAVs being destroyed. In addition, we try to accomplish two objectives simultaneously with meeting the fuel requirements and increasing the probability of target being destroyed by optimizing the load of fuel and bomb. The tabu search algorithm is adopted in the optimization of UAV routing, aborting and hitting strategies, and numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the performance of the algorithm.