Traveling Salesman Problem for Surveillance Mission Using Particle Swarm Optimization

The surveillance mission requires aircraft to fly from a starting point through defended terrain to targets and return to a safe destination (usually the starting point). The process of selecting such a flight path is known as the Mission Route Planning (MRP) Problem and is a three-dimensional, multi-criteria (fuel expenditure, time required, risk taken, priority targeting, goals met, etc.) path search. Planning aircraft routes involves an elaborate search through numerous possibilities, which can severely task the resources of the system being used to compute the routes. Operational systems can take up to a day to arrive at a solution due to the combinatoric nature of the problem. This delay is not acceptable because timeliness of obtaining surveillance information is critical in many surveillance missions. Also, the information that the software uses to solve the MRP may become invalid during computation. An effective and efficient way of solving the MRP with multiple aircraft and multiple targets is desired. One approach to funding solutions is to simplify and view the problem as a two-dimensional, minimum path problem.