An optimal control-based approach for the Dubins travelling salesman problem with neighbourhoods
Walton Pereira Coutinho – Université Laval, Canada

This study addresses the Dubins Travelling Salesman Problem with Neighbourhoods (DTSPN), a problem in which a Dubins vehicle, such as a drone or an underwater vehicle, must visit a set of continuous regions rather than discrete points, such as the neighbourhood of some areas of interest. Existing approaches for the DTSPN rely only on heuristic methods. We propose three Optimal Control (OC) formulations for the DTSPN and apply a direct transcription technique to convert the OC problems into Nonlinear Programming (NLP) counterparts, solvable by standard NLP solvers. Furthermore, we develop a decomposition algorithm to handle relatively large instances. Preliminary experiments indicate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. To our knowledge, this is the first work to deliver exact solutions for the DTSPN.
Location
Palasis-Prince Building
Université Laval
Québec Québec G1V 0A6
Canada