Multi-objective asset routing problem within a dynamic environment

Coordination among maritime assets is crucial for reducing task latencies and enabling the effectiveness and success of the mission. Specifically, determining when the assets are dispatched to task locations, optimizing how the assets traverse to the task location, and how much time the assets wait at various intermediate points on the way to task location is a difficult problem due to dynamic and uncertain characteristics of the mission environment. In this paper, motivated by the navy's relevant operational needs to effectively route search assets in a dynamic mission environment, we consider a coordinated asset routing problem within a multi-objective framework allowing for stopping en route. The key objective is to find routes for a set of assets, given the start and end locations, such that the total traversal time, dispatch time and the wait time at each intermediate location is minimized. Given a task graph over Time-dependent Multi-objective (TM) risk maps, we formulate and solve a Time-dependent Multi-objective Shortest Path (TMSP) problem to determine asset routes in a multi-task scenario. We employ the method of compromised solution along with mixed integer linear programming to solve this NP-hard problem. Numerical results are provided by applying our proposed approach to an asset routing mission scenario.