Multiuser Oriented Multi-UAV Mission Assignment With Cooperative Information Sharing

Due to the overlap of different users' information requirements for reconnaissance targets, when unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), serving multiple users, perform field reconnaissance missions, it is likely to cause repetitive visit to the same targets. To deal with this problem, a reasonable cooperative mission assignment algorithm is needed. By introducing information sharing mechanism with air communication among UAVs, this letter models the mission assignment problem as a vehicle routing problem with air information sharing (VRPAIS), which can efficiently avoid the repetitive visit of targets. An improved piecewise genetic algorithm with integer splitting is proposed to solve VRPAIS in polynomial time. Simulation results show that in the case of high overlap (about 80%) of information requirements, the proposed method is much more energy efficient compared with the traditional Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (MTSP) based method without information sharing, with an average energy savings rate of 34.2%.