Date of Award

3-2001

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Operational Sciences

First Advisor

Raymond R. Hill, PhD

Abstract

U.S. military forces employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct intelligence-gathering missions worldwide. For a typical mission, commanders may task UAV operators to gather imagery on 100 or more sites or targets. UAV operators must quickly prepare mission plans that meet the needs of their commanders while dealing with real-world constraints such as time windows, site priorities, imagery requirements, UAVs with different capabilities (i.e. imagery equipment, speed, and range), and UAVs departing from different bases. Previous AFIT research provided the UAV Battlelab with a tool, AFIT Router, for generating high-quality routes to aid mission planning. This research enhances the AFIT Router by providing the ability to define general restricted operating zones and to build routes that consider these zones. This research also examines and compares a probabilistic tabu search heuristic and two reactive tabu search heuristics for solving vehicle routing problems.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GOR-ENS-01M-04

DTIC Accession Number

ADA391265

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