Methodology of the iterative route determination process for the purposes of military passability

This research presents the methodology of the iterative route determination process, which takes into account the microrelief in real time. The determination of safe and secure routes is a pivotal element of planning and conducting military operations or various crisis management actions, as well as navigating troops or unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to reach their destination. This method uses only high resolution digital elevation model (DEM) and tractive parameters of a given vehicle to determine the route completely automatically. During the process, the microrelief analysis is performed, which aims to check whether the generated route and its surrounding is passable for a given vehicle. If it occurs that it is not, the algorithm determines new route and works in this manner until the final passable route is found. The conducted research showed that the developed method is able to determine the routes between the start and end point, avoiding all microrelief obstacles. A huge advantage of it is its universality because all parameters used for the computation can be adjusted by the user. The research also shows that their modification influences the performance of the method. The comprehensiveness of the tool makes it applicable to military or crisis management planning operations.