Hierarchical mission planning for multiple
vehicles airdrop operation
Tietao Wei and Xiangju Qu
School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics,
Beijing, People’s Republic of China, and
Liuping Wang
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Purpose – Airdrop operation has become an important transportation mode due to its mobility and rapidity and mission planning is one of the critical
steps in the preparation of an airdrop operation. The purpose of this paper is to propose an efficient mission planning method for airdrop operation
using multiple vehicles.
Design/methodology/approach – A hierarchical mission planning method is proposed. According to the objectives of the action, the mission
planning is divided into three planning levels to form the hierarchical structure and the constraints are distributed among them. By doing so, the
proposed approach converts the original mission planning problem to a constrained optimization problem, which is solvable using existing
mathematical methods.
Findings – On the basis of analysis, the mathematic models of three planning levels are established. Each level has its own optimization objective,
taking part of constraints into account. The integrated mission scheme had been obtained step by step.
Practical implications – This paper systematically tackles the complicated multiple vehicles airdrop mission planning problem, and it provides a
platform for optimizing the outcomes. The mathematical models established in this paper could apply in a variety of more complex mission scenarios.
Originality/value – This paper fulfils an urgent need to study how the advantages of airdrop operation can be maximized through planning airdrop
mission schemes carefully.
Keywords Transportation programming, Mission planning, Hierarchical, Airdrop operation, Route planning, Transportation, Military actions
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Airdrop operation is an important means by which crews and
supplies can be transported to designate regions using the
parachutes. The use of airdrop operation for various civil and
military missions (for example, disaster relief work,
transportation, emergency security and modern war) has
received a growing attention in the last century, and airdrop
has become an important transportation mode due to its
mobility and rapidity (Yang et al., 2006). In order to maximize
the advantages of airdrop operation, airdrop mission scheme
should be planned carefully with sufficient details by
considering synthetically all factors that may influence the
success and effect of airdrop mission (Yang et al., 2006;
Dellicker et al., 2000; Gregory et al., 1998).
In most situations, it is difficult for a single transport to
accomplish a predetermined airdrop mission, with its limited
payload and airhead geometry restriction. Therefore, in order
to accomplish the airdrop mission as quickly as possible and
to ensure that the mission is robust to potential transport
failure, multiple vehicles are often deployed (Shima et al.,
2006; Szczerba et al., 2000; Rajagopalan et al., 2008).
The multiple vehicles airdrop mission planning (MAMP) can
be considered as a cooperative path planning problem for
multiple vehicles, which is a complicated problem. In addition
to the constrains (such as kinematic constraint, flight range
constraint, threat constraint, etc.) faced by a single vehicle,
the constraints in the multi-vehicles airdrop mission include
the constraints relating to cooperation as mission objective,
time cooperation restriction and interspace cooperation
restriction, etc. In general, a multi-vehicles cooperation
mission planning problem can be divided into two sub-
problems: task assignment and flight path planning. In the
literature, these two sub-problems are solved using different
optimization methods by considering the types of constraints
(Rajagopalan et al., 2008; Pehlivanoglu et al., 2007; Lacasse-
Guay et al., 2010; Moitra et al., 2003) involved. In
comparison with traditional multi-vehicles cooperation
mission planning, MAMP possesses its own characteristics,
such as the influence of airhead and several characteristic
constraints (Gregory et al., 1998; Pei et al., 2003). In order to
ensure paratroops landing at the specified location, the
loading of transports and airdrop formation geometry are
restricted by airhead geometry. In addition, high span loads
result in large, strong wake vortex systems that can cause
serious problems for parachutes dropped from transport
downstream in a formation. It is obvious that the affected
degree of wake vortex is directly related to airdrop formation.
How to effectively describe and deal with the characteristic
constraints is an on-going research problem. Since 1995, US
Air Force had conducted a research on the strategic brigade
airdrop (SBA) operation which is a large-scale transportation
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1748-8842.htm
Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology: An International Journal
83/5 (2011) 315– 323
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 1748-8842]
[DOI 10.1108/00022661111159924]
315