An adaptive Cooperative Receding Horizon controller for the multivehicle routing problem

The objective of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), in the meaning of this paper, is to find the best path for a vehicle, or the best paths for a fleet of vehicles, with the aim of visiting a set of targets. Possible applications of the vehicle routing problem include surveillance, exploration, logistic,transportation, relief systems, etc. A lot of research has been carried out so far, but the VRP remains a complex and computationally expensive combinatorial problem, leading to the difficulty to actually solve the problem on-line. This paper presents a technique based on the Cooperative Receding Horizon (CRH) approach proposed in [Li06], in which a sequence of optimization problems are computed over a planning horizon and the decisions are applied only over a shorter action horizon, in order to rapidly adapt to possible configuration changes (e.g., new targets appearance). Moreover, the proposed algorithm is able to dynamically adapt to the time-variable configuration of both vehicles and targets as well as to handle the discovery of unknown targets. Several proof of concept simulations show the enhancements of the proposed technique in comparison to the one in [Li06].