Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem for Carrier-Vehicle Systems

In this paper, a mission planning problem for a team of collaborating vehicles is presented. The team consists of two vehicles: an aircraft, typically fast but with short flight endurance, and a marine carrier, typically slow but with negligible endurance limitations. The carrier is able to transport, deploy, recover, and service the aircraft. This paper focuses on the problem of determining the team's trajectory that minimizes the time to visit a given set of locations. Since the resulting optimization problem is computationally difficult, a low-complexity heuristic is proposed. The proposed heuristic is obtained by decomposing the original problem into three easier subproblems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through extensive numerical simulations.