Routing Military Aircraft With A Constrained Shortest-Path Algorithm

• Published in: Military operations research (Alexandria, Va.) Vol. 14; no. 3; pp. 31 - 52
• Main Authors: Royset, Johannes O., Carlyle, W. Matthew, Wood, R. Kevin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Military Operations Research Society 01.01.2009
• Subjects: Aircraft; Algorithms; Fuel consumption; Lagrangian function; Military aircraft; Military operations; Operations research; Radar; Unmanned aerial vehicles; Vertices
• ISSN: 1082-5983; 2163-2758
• DOI: 10.5711/morj.14.3.31

We formulate and solve aircraftrouting problems that arise when planning missions for military aircraft that are subject to ground-based threats such as surface-to-air missiles. We use a constrained shortest-path (CSP) model that discretizes the relevant airspace into a grid of vertices representing potential waypoints, and connects those vertices with directed edges to represent potential flight segments. The model is flexible: It can route any type of manned or unmanned aircraft; it can incorporate any number of threats; and it can incorporate, in the objective function or as side constraints, numerous missionspecific metrics such as risk, fuel consumption, and flight time. We apply a new algorithm for solving the CSP problem and present computational results for the routing of a high-altitude F/A-18 strike group, and the routing of a medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle. The objectives minimize risk from ground-based threats while constraints limit fuel consumption and/or flight time. Run times to achieve a near-optimal solution range from fractions of a second to 80 seconds on a personal computer. We also demonstrate that our methods easily extend to handle turn-radius constraints and round-trip routing.