Planning of UAV Flight Routes in the Problems of Group Patrolling of the Extended Territories

Currently one of the promising areas of joint use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is group air patrolling of large territories. Here the organization of patrolling assumes the solving the planning problem of routes flight of UAV group. The paper considers the problem of optimal planning of flight routes of the same type of UAVs during group patrolling of large territories. The territorial waters or narrow border areas of any State may serve as an example of such territories. It is suggested that the patrolled area has an elongated shape and is divided into a chain of adjacent patrol zones prescribed by a separate UAV. The drone’s flight route passes through adjacent zones. The flight task performed periodically by each drone consists in moving it to a given flight zone, collecting operational data and transmitting this data to a control point (center, station). The optimization aspect of UAV flight route planning is to minimize the maximum time required to complete flight tasks. The considered problem of group patrolling reduced to the multiple traveling salesman problem — one of the classic intractable combinatorial optimization problems. A brief analysis of modern methods for solving the multiple traveling salesman problem is given. Due to the lack of effective exact methods for solving this problem, it is natural to use approximate heuristic and metaheuristic methods focused on solving NP-hard optimization problems, reducing the full search and giving a solution close to the exact one. The multiple traveling salesman problem considered in this paper is reduced to the problem of integer linear programming, for the solution of which a genetic algorithm implemented in MATLAB based on the mathematical package Global Optimization Toolbox is proposed. An illustrative example of patrolling by three UAVs of an extended territory with 11 adjacent zones is considered. Computational experiments confirm the effectiveness of the algorithmic solutions proposed in the work.