Multiple Carrier-Vehicle Travelling Salesman Problem

In this paper the Carrier-Vehicle Travelling Salesman Problem (CV-TSP) is extended to the case of 2 carriers and one small vehicle. The paper defines a minimum-time trajectory mission plan for the visit of a group of target points by the small vehicle. In this scenario, the main goal is to optimize the use of both carriers as a support of the vehicle. A Mixed-Integer Second Order Conic Programming (MISCOP) formulation is proposed for the case of a given order of visit. Additionally, the authors develop a fast heuristic which provides close to optimal results in a decent computational time. To end the paper several simulations are computed to show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.