An Integrated Mission Planning Framework for Sensor Allocation and Path Planning of Heterogeneous Multi-UAV Systems

Mission planning is the guidance for a UAV team to perform missions, which plays the most critical role in military and civil applications. For complex tasks, it requires heterogeneous cooperative multi-UAVs to satisfy several mission requirements. Meanwhile, airborne sensor allocation and path planning are the critical components of heterogeneous multi-UAVs system mission planning problems, which affect the mission profit to a large extent. This paper establishes the mathematical model for the integrated sensor allocation and path planning problem to maximize the total task profit and minimize travel costs, simultaneously. We present an integrated mission planning framework based on a two-level adaptive variable neighborhood search algorithm to address the coupled problem. The first-level is devoted to planning a reasonable airborne sensor allocation plan, and the second-level aims to optimize the path of the heterogeneous multi-UAVs system. To improve the mission planning framework’s efficiency, an adaptive mechanism is presented to guide the search direction intelligently during the iterative process. Simulation results show that the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Compared to the conventional methods, the better performance of planning results is achieved.