Ant Colony Optimization for routing and tasking problems for teams of UAVs

Thi s paper presents an enhanced version of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for solving a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), which is utilized for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) task allocation and route planning. The extended VRP incorporates multiple UAVs, collision avoidance between intersecting routes, and the possibility of loitering between tasks. The ACO adopts a multi-colony approach to incorporate variable loitering times. Numerical experiments and comparison to previous work are illustrated to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

[1]  Darren M. Chitty,et al.  A Hybrid Ant Colony Optimisation Technique for Dynamic Vehicle Routing , 2004, GECCO.

[2]  Maged M. Dessouky,et al.  A Model and Algorithm for the Courier Delivery Problem with Uncertainty , 2010, Transp. Sci..

[3]  Dimitris Bertsimas,et al.  A Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demand , 1992, Oper. Res..

[4]  Daniel Merkle,et al.  Bi-Criterion Optimization with Multi Colony Ant Algorithms , 2001, EMO.

[5]  Harilaos N. Psaraftis,et al.  Dynamic vehicle routing: Status and prospects , 1995, Ann. Oper. Res..

[6]  Jianhua Ma,et al.  Mutation Ant Colony Algorithm of Milk-Run Vehicle Routing Problem with Fastest Completion Time Based on Dynamic Optimization , 2013 .

[7]  Nicolas Durand,et al.  Finding and Proving the Optimum: Cooperative Stochastic and Deterministic Search , 2012, ECAI.

[8]  Tobias Teich,et al.  A multi-objective ant colony approach for pareto-optimization using dynamic programming , 2008, GECCO '08.

[9]  Daobo Wang,et al.  UAV path planning method based on ant colony optimization , 2010, 2010 Chinese Control and Decision Conference.

[10]  Zanariah Abdul Majid,et al.  Ant Colony Optimization for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem , 2012 .

[11]  Ketan Kotecha,et al.  Dynamic scheduling for real-time distributed systems using ant colony optimization , 2010, Int. J. Intell. Comput. Cybern..

[12]  Roberto Montemanni,et al.  Ant Colony System for a Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem , 2005, J. Comb. Optim..

[13]  E.-G. Talbia,et al.  Parallel Ant Colonies for the quadratic assignment problem , 2001, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[14]  Han-Lim Choi,et al.  Real-Time Multi-UAV Task Assignment in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments , 2009 .

[15]  Wenbin Hu,et al.  A Hybrid Chaos-Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window , 2013, Entropy.

[16]  George B. Dantzig,et al.  The Truck Dispatching Problem , 1959 .

[17]  Xuanjing Shen,et al.  An adaptive ant colony algorithm based on common information for solving the Traveling Salesman Problem , 2012, 2012 International Conference on Systems and Informatics (ICSAI2012).

[18]  Gen-ke Yang,et al.  Hybrid discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm for capacitated vehicle routing problem , 2006 .

[19]  Yi-Ting Huang,et al.  A Hybrid Algorithm Based on ACO and PSO for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems , 2012 .

[20]  Reza Zanjirani Farahani,et al.  A Hybrid Ant Colony System for Partially Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem , 2012 .

[21]  Haibin Duan,et al.  Improved Ant Colony Algorithm for Global Optimal Trajectory Planning of UAV under Complex Environment , 2007, Int. J. Comput. Sci. Appl..

[22]  Rong Du,et al.  Path Planning with Obstacle Avoidance in PEGs: Ant Colony Optimization Method , 2010, 2010 IEEE/ACM Int'l Conference on Green Computing and Communications & Int'l Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing.

[23]  Marco Dorigo,et al.  Ant system: optimization by a colony of cooperating agents , 1996, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B.

[24]  Zhang Weiguo,et al.  UAV route planning using Multiobjective Ant Colony System , 2008, 2008 IEEE Conference on Cybernetics and Intelligent Systems.

[25]  Robert H. Storer,et al.  An approximate dynamic programming approach for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands , 2009, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[26]  Malcolm J. A. Strens,et al.  Combining Planning with Reinforcement Learning for Multi-robot Task Allocation , 2004, Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[27]  Arthur Richards,et al.  Chapter 1 MULTITASK ALLOCATION AND PATH PLANNING FOR COOPERATING UAVS , 2001 .