Multiple UAVs routing in reconnaissance mission based on hybrid multi-objective evolutionary algorithm

The observation time on the target is usually uncertain due to the complexity and uncertainty of reconnaissance missions. The multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) reconnaissance problem with a stochastic observation time (MURSOT) is modeled as a multi-objective optimal routing problem including minimizing mission duration, total time and fleet size. For solving this problem, a multi-objective local search is incorporated to a steady-state multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) with ε-dominance conception (epsMOEA). Besides, several heuristic genetic operations using the insert-to-nearest method (INM) are proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective on MURSOT and its superiority is more remarkable with the growth of the size of missions.