Flight Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

We formulate the mission planning problem for a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem (MINLP). The problem asks for a selection of targets from a list to the UAVs, and trajectories that visit the chosen targets. To be feasible, a trajectory must pass each target at a desired distance and within a certain time window, obstacles or regions of high risk must be avoided, and the fuel limitations must be obeyed. An optimal trajectory maximizes the sum of values of all targets that can be visited, and as a secondary goal, conducts the mission in the shortest possible time. In order to obtain numerical solutions to this model, we approximate the MINLP by an mixed-integer linear program (MILP), and apply state-of-the-art solvers (Cplex, Gurobi) to the latter on a set of test instances.