Path planning for UAVs with a moving maintenance center

Abstract

The article examines methods for path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with a mobile maintenance center (MMC). The task under study involves a single UAV and a single MMC, which has multiple deployment locations. The aim of the work is to improve the quality of flight paths. To solve the problem, a greedy algorithm, an artificial bee colony algorithm, and a tabu search algorithm were developed. The proposed bee algorithm includes three methods for organizing the work of scout bees and five methods for organizing the work of forager bees, with combinations forming 15 different algorithms. For the tabu search algorithm, four methods of local optimization were developed. Experiments showed that the best of the tabu search algorithms operated significantly faster than the best of the bee algorithms, but on average, it slightly lagged in the quality of the constructed flight paths.