Multi-Objective Utility Optimization-Based Cooperative Mission Planning for UAVs

In recent years, benefited from their flexibility, low cost and high performance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in many fields. In this paper, we investigate the problem of mission planning for heterogeneous UAVs. A joint trajectory planning and mission assignment problem is formulated as a constrained multi-objective system utility function maximization problem. To solve the formulated problem, a two-stage heuristic algorithm is proposed. Specifically, a hybrid Tabu simulated annealing-based trajectory optimization is proposed in the first stage. Then, based on the trajectory strategy of UAVs, we present a two-sided matching-based mission assignment algorithm. Simulation results show that compared to baseline algorithms, the proposed algorithm offers better performance.