An Iterative Two-Phase Optimization Method Based on Divide and Conquer Framework for Integrated Scheduling of Multiple UAVs

Task scheduling of multiple UAVs has become a highly active area of research in recent years. Previous research has generally solved the problem in a whole manner, which makes it hard to efficiently generate high-quality task scheduling schemes due to prohibitive computational complexity. By contrast, the paper constructs a novel divide and conquer framework for multi-UAV task scheduling (DCF), which partitions the original multi-UAV scheduling problem into multiple scheduling sub-problems for all the UAVs. To be specific, DCF includes two phases: one is the task allocation phase which produces multiple scheduling sub-problems and the other is the single UAV scheduling phase which generates the scheduling scheme with sequential tasks for each single UAV considering constraints involving UAV capabilities and task demands. Two phases are iteratively performed until the predefined stopping criteria are met. In the task allocation phase, we propose a tabu-list-based simulated annealing (SATL) algorithm to realize task allocation among multiple UAVs. After obtaining the task allocation scheme, a satisfactory scheduling scheme of each single UAV is generated by variable neighborhood descent (VND) algorithm. Extensive experiments and comparative studies are conducted, demonstrating the efficiency of DCF and the proposed SATL-VND algorithm.