Hybrid solving technique for vehicle planning with communication constraints

The complexity of modern engagements and the numerous communication links made available increase the difficulties of mission planning and execution. In particular, finding unit waypoints while meeting frequencies allocation is a hard operational problem. Continuity of communications among the command chain must be guaranteed on the move in spite of tactical mobility, networks availability, path loss, jamming, mission updates and versatile threats. In previous works, we proposed a problem formulation relying on vehicle plan optimization, that satisfies network connectivity and operational constraints. This paper adress hybrid search techniques to solve Bandwidth-constrained Vehicle Planning (BVP) on-line problem instances. It is modeled using constraint-based formulations to express both network connectivity and operational requirements (missions, waypoints, terrain). Vehicle planning is then solved and optimized according to a combination of a metaheuristic, namely an Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO), and Constraint Programming (CP) techniques. Various forms of optimization strategies are compared and evaluated on realistic scenarios, outperforming previous results.