An application of heuristic search techniques to the problem of flight path generation in a military hostile environment

• Authors: Verlynda S. Dobbs;Henry W. Davis;Carl Lizza
• Venue: IEA/AIE '88 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Industrial and engineering applications of artificial intelligence and expert systems - Volume 1
• Year: 1988

This paper is a study of the effectiveness of heuristic search algorithms in generating flight paths. Due to the need to generate and revise paths dynamically we are interested in execution speed as well as solution quality (conflict cost plus path length). Extensive tests with three search algorithms were made using a simple threat model. Using straight-forward heuristics, we found that two of the algorithms perform well then their weights are appropriately adjusted. One is A* and the other is a bidirectional search. Our results indicate that heuristic search is effective in flight path generation and provide details about algorithms which were successful.