Resilient multi-objective mission planning for UAV formation: A unified framework integrating task pre- and re-assignment

Combat effectiveness of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) formations can be severely affected by the mission execution reliability. During the practical execution phase, there are inevitable risks where UAVs being destroyed or targets failed to be executed. To improve the mission reliability, a resilient mission planning framework integrates task pre- and re-assignment modules is developed in this paper. In the task pre-assignment phase, to guarantee the mission reliability, probability constraints regarding the minimum mission success rate are imposed to establish a multi-objective optimization model. And an improved genetic algorithm with the multi-population mechanism and specifically designed evolutionary operators is used for efficient solution. As in the task-reassignment phase, possible trigger events are first analyzed. A real-time contract net protocol-based algorithm is then proposed to address the corresponding emergency scenario. And the dual objective used in the former phase is adapted into a single objective to keep a consistent combat intention. Three cases of different scales demonstrate that the two modules cooperate well with each other. On the one hand, the pre-assignment module can generate high-reliability mission schedules as an elaborate mathematical model is introduced. On the other hand, the re-assignment module can efficiently respond to various emergencies and adjust the original schedule within a millisecond. The corresponding animation is accessible at bilibili.com/video/BV12t421w7EE for better illustration.