Flexible Combinatorial-Bids-Based Auction for Cooperative Target Assignment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

For the cooperative reconnaissance assignment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on multiple targets, this paper presents a flexible combinatorial-bids-based auction (FCBA) method that can optimize the number of UAVs for each target. Considering the reconnaissance effectiveness enhancement achieved with cooperative observation and the time-critical characteristic of targets, the multitarget assignment problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer optimization to maximize the cooperative effectiveness. To achieve target assignment without predetermining the number of UAVs for each target, a combinatorial bidding framework is proposed, and an allocation method for rewards and costs among the cooperative UAVs is constructed. Strategies for auction iteration and bid updating are also designed to acquire equilibrium results under the combinatorial bidding mechanism. The simulation results show that the proposed method can generate satisfactory suboptimal results according to the enumerated solutions. A comparison of the results demonstrates that the FCBA can provide comparable optimal results to a genetic algorithm but has better computational efficiency, and the reconnaissance effectiveness can be improved by considering cooperative observation.

Keywords

• target assignment
• cooperative reconnaissance
• cooperative observation
• auction
• combinatorial bids