A Mission Planning Method for Long-Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Integrating Heterogeneous Ground Control Resource Allocation

Long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (LE-UAVs) are extensively used due to their vast coverage and significant payload capacities. However, their limited autonomous intelligence necessitates the intervention of ground control resources (GCRs), which include one or more operators, during mission execution. The performance of these missions is notably affected by the varying effectiveness of different GCRs and their fatigue levels. Current research on multi-UAV mission planning inadequately addresses these critical factors. To tackle this practical issue, we present an integrated optimization problem for multi-LE-UAV mission planning combined with heterogeneous GCR allocation. This problem extends traditional multi-UAV cooperative mission planning by incorporating GCR allocation decisions. The coupling of mission planning decisions with GCR allocation decisions increases the dimensionality of the decision space, rendering the problem more complex. By analyzing the problem’s characteristics, we develop a mixed-integer linear programming model. To effectively solve this problem, we propose a bilevel programming algorithm based on a hybrid genetic algorithm framework. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm effectively solves the problem, outperforming the advanced optimization toolkit CPLEX. Remarkably, for larger-scale instances, our algorithm achieves superior solutions within 10 s compared with CPLEX’s 2 h runtime.