Speaker: Diclehan Tezcaner Öztürk (Department of Industrial Engineering at
Hacettepe University)
Title: Multi-objective UAV Routing in Continuous Space
Date: 18th April 2025 (Friday)
Time: 13:30-14:30
Place: EA409
Abstract
We consider the route planning problem for an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) tasked with collecting information from multiple targets in a protected terrain. The UAV is free to move to any point within the terrain, aiming to minimize both distance and radar detection threat, and maximize the information collected from the targets visited. This routing problem in the presence of multiple targets, multiple objectives, and continuous movement assumption is a complex problem. Between any two targets there is a continuum of efficient trajectory options. Thus, finding a route requires determining both the visiting order to the targets and the trajectory to be used between consecutive target pairs. We first consider a discretized terrain formulation for this problem, in which the route is formed by selecting the trajectory to follow from a few of the trajectory options. We also consider a continuous terrain formulation allowing the trajectory to be selected from a continuum of trajectory options. We compare the two models on an instance with 15 targets. In most cases, the continuous terrain model yields solutions that outperform those of the discretized terrain model. For the continuous terrain model, we also develop an approximation algorithm that significantly reduces its computational requirements and ensures a desired level of precision. We demonstrate the algorithm on the same instance, and show that it results in an approximate nondominated frontier that is sufficiently close to the true nondominated frontier.
Short Bio
Diclehan Tezcaner Öztürk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Hacettepe University. She holds BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees from the Industrial Engineering Department at Middle East Technical University. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Strathclyde. Her primary research interests include logistics and multiobjective decision making, with a particular focus on multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems.