Minisum and maximin aerial surveillance over disjoint rectangles

Abstract

The aerial surveillance problem (ASP) is finding the shortest path for an aerial surveillance platform that has to visit each rectangular area once and conduct a search in strips to cover the area at an acceptable level of efficiency and turn back to the base from which it starts. In this study, we propose a new formulation for ASP with salient features. The proposed formulation that is based on the travelling salesman problem enables more efficient use of search platforms and solutions to realistic problems in reasonable time. We also present a max–min version of ASP that maximizes the minimum probability of target detection given the maximum flight distance of an aerial platform. We provide computational results that demonstrate features of the proposed models.