MQP 2015 – Pre-Mission Flight Plan Optimization

MQP2015_draper

The goal of this project is develop a tool to help with mission planning undertaken at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration in partnership with Draper Laboratory. The aim of these missions is to gather data using Earth- observing aircraft at a set of sites. In this project, we aim to minimize the total mission time. We model this minimization problem as a variant of the Distance Constrained Vehicle Routing Problem. We present two integer programming formulations of the problem as well as a supporting proof. While the results we present show that the solution time is limited by the available flight time for each aircraft and the number of vehicles, our implementation of the integer programming problem is able to solve problems with up to 35 sites.