More and more often, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used to carry out transport or observation tasks. For a successful application, detailed mission and flight planning is essential. Requirements for the technical equipment of the UAVs and their performance parameters can rule assignments between some UAVs and specific tasks out. Furthermore, direct flight routes can be blocked by determined restricted air spaces. The safety regulations of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) must be observed to integrate the used UAVs into the existing air traffic. Occurring wind also has a significant influence on flight characteristics.
To compute optimal flight trajectories, we formulate the problem as a mixed-integer optimization task. We discretize Newton's equations of motion and apply mixed-integer linear solvers for its numerical solution.

Related talks

• Johannes Schmidt: Mission and Flight Planning for an Inhomogeneous Fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, 31st European Conference on Operational Research EURO 2021 July 11-14, 2021, Athen, Griechenland, 14.07.2021.
• Johannes Schmidt: Mission and Flight Planning for an Inhomogeneous Fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, WSOPT 2021, Cottbus, 25.03.2021.
• Johannes Schmidt: Mission and Flight Planning for an Inhomogeneous Fleet of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, DMV Jahrestagung 2020, Chemnitz, 17.09.2020.
• Armin Fügenschuh: Mission and Trajectory Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Mathematical Optimization and Wargaming, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey (CA), 10.10.2019.
• Armin Fügenschuh: Mission and Trajectory Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Mathematical Optimization and Wargaming, 13th NATO OR&A Conference, October 7-9, 2019, Ottawa, Kanada, 7.10.2019.
• Armin Fügenschuh: Mission and Path Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, 29th European Conference on Operational Research EURO 2019 July 3-6, 2019, Dublin, Irland, 25.6.2019.
• Armin Fügenschuh: Flight Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, 28th European Conference on Operational Research EURO 2016 July 3-6, 2016,Poznan, Polen, 4.7.2016.
• Armin Fügenschuh: Flight Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, 4th IMA Conference on Mathematics in Defence, Harwell/Oxford, UK, 26.11.2015.

Related publications

• Johannes Schmidt, Armin Fügenschuh, A Two-time-level model for mission and flight planning of an inhomogeneous fleet of umanned aerial vehicles, Cottbus Mathematical Preprints #16, 2021 (preprint). URL: doi.org/10.26127/BTUOpen-5461
• Armin Fügenschuh, Daniel Müllenstedt, Johannes Schmidt, Mission planning for unmanned aerial vehicles, Military Operations Research, Vol. 26, Issue 3, 2021.
• Armin Fügenschuh, Daniel Müllenstedt, Flight Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Proceedings of the 4th IMA Conference on Mathematics in Defence, 2015. URL: cdn.ima.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Flightplanning-for-unmanned-aerial-vehicles.pdf