CORMSIS seminar: Glider Routing and Trajectory Optimisation Problems in Disaster Assessment Event

Event details

Abstract: In recent years, good progress has been made in employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to collect data and make measurements, instead of relegating such tasks to human teams. Often, the use of UAVs also allows for a reduction in costs and improvements of other performance criteria. All those characteristics make UAVs suitable for disaster assessment, response and management. While the utilisation of powered UAVs has been broadly investigated in the literature, the employment of unpowered UAVs such as gliders has not being well explored. In fact, specialised control systems based on optimisation must be developed in order to guide such vehicles during their operations. We are thus faced with the problem of routing a glider in a heterogeneous medium (such as in a wind fields), bringing together the difficulties of solving a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and a Trajectory Optimisation Problem. In this presentation, we will describe the problem definition, a modelling framework, some preliminary computational results, and comment on the current status of my research project.