Vehicle Routing for Resource Management in Time-Phased Deployment of Sensor Networks

Time-phased sensor-network deployment refers to the delivery of a set of sensors to their predetermined locations at exact times by a fleet of vehicles. Applications for such network deployments include wilderness search and rescue (WiSAR) and wildfire monitoring, where desirable resource management would imply allowing the vehicles to perform other tasks between deliveries. The goal of this paper is, thus, to formulate and solve a vehicle-routing problem (VRP) for such just-in-time time-phased sensor-network deployments. The proposed optimization method for the modified VRP outlined herein has two primary novelties: 1) the consideration of spare time as the objective function and 2) the use of a targeted local-search (LS) method. The spare-time objective function was formulated to address the uniqueness of the modified routing problem at hand. The targeted LS algorithm, on the other hand, was developed to tangibly improve the efficiency of the search for the optimal values of the chosen objective function. The proposed vehicle-route-planning method was validated via a range of simulated WiSAR scenarios, some of which are included herein. The robustness of the method to variations in problem parameters was also investigated.