Ant Colony Optimization for routing and tasking problems for teams of UAVs

Thi s paper presents an enhanced version of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for solving a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), which is utilized for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) task allocation and route planning. The extended VRP incorporates multiple UAVs, collision avoidance between intersecting routes, and the possibility of loitering between tasks. The ACO adopts a multi-colony approach to incorporate variable loitering times. Numerical experiments and comparison to previous work are illustrated to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.