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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
In recent years, UAVs been have extensively used as relays in disaster management applications. By the dynamic nature of UAVs as they traverse rugged terrains, the problem of determining the interconnections among UAVs is important from the view point of power consumption, maximum number of communication links and robust connectivity. We pose this network synthesis problem as a Mixed Integer Semi-Definite Program (MISDP) with the smallest non-zero eigenvalue of the weighted networks’s Laplacian matrix as the measure for robustness. Solving this MISDP is a difficult optimization problem because of its non-linear objective coupled with the possibility that the number of feasible solutions combinatorially explode with the size of the network. In this presentation, we discuss novel algorithms based on cutting plane methods to obtain optimal solutions and upper bounds for problems of moderate sizes. Also, based on the spectrum of connected networks, we develop efficient neighbourhood search heuristics which can be applied for large UAV networks.
Host: Russell Bent