A branch‐and‐bound‐based solution approach for dynamic rerouting of airborne platforms

Abstract

This article is a sequel to a recent article that appeared in this journal, "An extensible modeling framework for dynamic reassignment and rerouting in cooperative airborne operations" [17], in which an integer programming formulation to the problem of rescheduling in-flight assets due to changes in battlespace conditions was presented. The purpose of this article is to present an improved branch-and-bound procedure to solve the dynamic resource management problem in a timely fashion, as in-flight assets must be quickly re-tasked to respond to the changing environment. To facilitate the rapid generation of attractive updated mission plans, this procedure uses a technique for reducing the solution space, supports branching on multiple decision variables simultaneously, incorporates additional valid cuts to strengthen the minimal network constraints of the original mathematical model, and includes improved objective function bounds. An extensive numerical analysis indicates that the proposed approach significantly outperforms traditional branch-and-bound methodologies and is capable of providing improved feasible solutions in a limited time. Although inspired by the dynamic resource management problem in particular, this approach promises to be an effective tool for solving other general types of vehicle routing problems.

Dynamic rerouting of vehicles during cooperative wildfire response operations

“…To address the quality of solutions, future work into efficient solution methods to solve larger problems in a short time frame would be valuable. Murray and Karwan (2013) used a branch and bound method to solve a similar rerouting model. Modifications to this approach could make it applicable to the problem presented here.…”

“…Murray and Karwan (2010) provided a modelling framework which can model a wide variety of vehicle routing problems, including the TOPTW. A follow up paper by the same authors presented a branch-and-bound based method for solving their unmanned aerial vehicle assignment model (Murray and Karwan, 2013).…”

A real-time network approach for including obstacles and flight dynamics in UAV route planning

“…2–7 Dynamic routing algorithms can have single objectives 8–10 or multiple objectives. 11–14 Similar to mission planning algorithms, they also may contain elements such as time windows for the targets, payload capacity, fuel capacity, the ability to skip certain targets, and precedence in targets.…”

Risk-based route planning and decision making for unmanned aircraft system operations in urban environments

“…Another branch of existing works studied the 3D spatial path adjustment for conflict resolution. Local rerouting is one of the primary players [43], [119], [120]. Researchers use mathematical programming models to construct timely rerouting, and effective algorithms such as Branch-and Cut have been proposed to solve the problems.…”

“…For instance, as we can see from the results in Fig. 6.11, there are four ranges of flight number, which are [20,120], [140,180], [200,260], and [280, 300] with an interval of 20. In the first range, all indicators are convergent.…”