The selective travelling salesman problem
Discrete Applied Mathematics - Southampton conference on combinatorial optimization, April 1987
A heuristic for the multiple tour maximum collection problem
Computers and Operations Research
Computers and Operations Research - Special issue on the traveling salesman problem
Metaheuristics for the team orienteering problem
Journal of Heuristics
A TABU search heuristic for the team orienteering problem
Computers and Operations Research
Selected Topics in Column Generation
Operations Research
Priority-based assignment and routing of a fleet of unmanned combat aerial vehicles
Computers and Operations Research
Ants can solve the team orienteering problem
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Real-time path planning with limited information for autonomous unmanned air vehicles
Automatica (Journal of IFAC)
Evolutionary algorithm based offline/online path planner for UAV navigation
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics
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Military reconnaissance missions often employ a set of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with sensors to gather intelligence information from a set of known targets. UAVs are limited by the number of sensors they can hold; also attaching a sensor adds weight to the aircraft which in turn reduces the flight time available during a mission. The task of optimally assigning sensors to UAVs and routing them through a target field to maximize intelligence gain is a generalization of the team orienteering problem studied in the vehicle routing literature. This work presents a mathematical programming model for simultaneous sensor selection and routing of UAVs, which solves optimally using CPLEX for simple missions. Larger missions required the development of three heuristics, which were augmented by Column Generation. Results from a performance study indicated that the heuristics quickly found good solutions. Column Generation improved the solution in many instances, with minimal impact on overall solution time. The rapid nature of the overall solution approach allows it to be used in other mission planning tasks. A fleet sizing application is discussed as an example of its flexible usage.