A REVIEW ON THE MCS-OPTW PLANNING APPROACH FOR UAV MISSIONS

In this thesis, different approaches to find efficient tours for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are implemented. The heuristic developed by Evers et al. (2014), the Maximum Coverage Stochastic Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (MCS-OPTW), is implemented and the results are compared on a new dataset. This approach takes uncertainty in travel and recording times, time sensitive targets and the appearance of new targets into account. The performance of this approach is illustrated with computational experiments in terms of two objectives: the average profit gained by foreseen targets and the percentage of new targets reached in time. In the end, some possible adjustments to the simulation are discussed. All results are compared to a deterministic planning approach.