Solving Relay Task Allocation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Solution Using Group Multirole Assignment

Abstract

When multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) perform tasks collaboratively, a relay dispatching method has a beneficial effect on the continuity of the task execution; i.e., the UAVs can take off and land using shared base stations. However, an increase of the number of demands and base stations can lead to a rapid increase of the number of involved UAVs. Such conditions may cause frequent conflicts when assigning dispatching base stations according to their stocks and capacity. For this concern, this article formalizes the relay task allocation problem of multiple UAVs (RTAPMU) based on group multirole assignment (GMRA), which is a submodel of E-CARGO, i.e., the general model of role-based collaboration (RBC). Through the revised GMRA model, we linearly constrain the capacity and dynamic inventory of the base station to ensure that there are sufficient UAVs to perform the mission. The proposed method is verified by simulation experiments on real-world problems. Since GMRA is a hard optimization model, the results show that the proposed method can obtain the global optimal solution of a one-day relay task assignment in 6.97 s. Furthermore, large-scale random experiments show that the proposed method is practicable and reasonable.