An Effective Guided Fireworks Algorithm for Solving UCAV Path Planning Problem

The use of the unmanned aerial vehicles is rapidly growing in the ever more extensive range of applications where the military is the oldest ones. One of the fundamental problems in the unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) control is the path planning problem that refers to optimization of the flight route subject to various constraints inside the battlefield environments. Since the number of control points is high as well as the number of radars, the traditional methods could not produce acceptable results when tackling this problem. In this paper, we propose an adjustment of the recent guided fireworks algorithm from the class of swarm intelligence algorithms for locating the optimal path by unmanned combat aerial vehicle taking into consideration fuel consumption and safety degree. For experimental purposes, we compared it with eight different methods from the literature. Based on the experimental results, it can be concluded that our proposed approach is robust, exhibits better performance in almost all cases.