Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2018, Vol. 29 ›› Issue (5): 953-968.doi: 10.21629/JSEE.2018.05.08

• Systems Engineering • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Weapon configuration, allocation and route planning with time windows for multiple unmanned combat air vehicles

Jiaming ZHANG*(), Zhong LIU(), Jianmai SHI(), Chao CHEN()   

  • Received:2017-03-13 Online:2018-10-26 Published:2018-11-14
  • Contact: Jiaming ZHANG E-mail:zjm08091018@163.com;phillipliu@263.net;jianmaishi@gmail.com
  • About author:ZHANG Jiaming was born in 1982. He received his B.S. degree in communication command from National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China, in 2004. From 2004 to 2008, he was a commanding officer in combat troops. He received his M.S. degree in military training from National University of Defense Technology, in 2010. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in management science and engineering at National University of Defense Technology. His current research interests include task assignment, mission planning and supply chain management. E-mail: zjm08091018@163.com|LIU Zhong is a professor of the National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China, and the deputy director of Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Laboratory as well as a senior advisor of the Research Center for Computational Experiments and Parallel Systems at National University of Defense Technology. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. His main research interests include planning systems, computational organization and intelligent systems. E-mail: phillipliu@263.net|SHI Jianmai is an associate research fellow of the National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, Hunan, China, and a researcher of Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Laboratory. His main research interests include task assignment, mission planning and supply chain management. E-mail: jianmaishi@gmail.com|CHEN Chao was born in 1977. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from National University of Defense Technology in 2003 and 2007 respectively. He is now an associate research fellow in National University of Defense Technology. His research interests include complexity of war systems, battle modeling and simulation, and automatization in command and control system. E-mail: jianmaishi@gmail.com
  • Supported by:
    the National Natural Science Foundation of China(71471175);the National Natural Science Foundation of China(71471174);This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71471175; 71471174)

Abstract:

Unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) mission planning is a fairly complicated global optimum problem. Military attack missions often employ a fleet of UCAVs equipped with weapons to attack a set of known targets. A UCAV can carry different weapons to accomplish different combat missions. Choice of different weapons will have different effects on the final combat effectiveness. This work presents a mixed integer programming model for simultaneous weapon configuration and route planning of UCAVs, which solves the problem optimally using the IBM ILOG CPLEX optimizer for simple missions. This paper develops a heuristic algorithm to handle the medium-scale and large-scale problems. The experiments demonstrate the performance of the heuristic algorithm in solving the medium scale and large scale problems. Moreover, we give suggestions on how to select the most appropriate algorithm to solve different scale problems.

Key words: unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), mission planning, route planning, weapon configuration, time windows