Optimal route design for an airship collecting and delivering logs in difficult environmental conditions
Résumé
In this paper, we consider the problem of computing the optimal route to be followed by an airship collecting logs in order to bring them to a sawmill. The problem is separated into two phases. In the first one, we aim to determine the touring order and the number of logs to be collected for each round-trip between the logging area and the sawmill. The strategy is designed by taking into account the airship sensitivity to atmospheric conditions, which makes the cost to join a heap of logs highly dependent on the vehicle orientation with respect to the wind direction. The determination is achieved by solving an instance of a combinatorial problem called Asymmetric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (ACVRP). We introduce airship enhanced Dubins paths taking the wind influence into account to compare more realistic transition costs easily. During the second phase, the resulting heap-to-heap trajectories are calculated so as to minimize the travel cost consisting of the time and energy consumption. The equations of generic nonlinear airship dynamics are derived and used for trajectory optimization. The resulting performances are illustrated with a mountainous scenario with varying windspeed. The overall scheme forms an innovative approach to solve issues related to typical airship missions.