A Cooperative Evolutionary Computation Algorithm for Dynamic Multiobjective Multi-AUV Path Planning

Multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are popular for executing submarine missions, which involve multiple targets distributed in a large and complex underwater environment. The path planning of multiple AUVs is a significant and challenging problem, which determines the location of surface points for AUV launch and plans the paths of AUVs for target traveling. Most existing works model the problem as a single-objective static optimization problem. However, the target missions may change over time, and multiple optimization objectives are usually expected for decision making. Thus, this article models the problem as a dynamic multiobjective optimization problem and proposes a cooperative evolutionary computation algorithm to provide diverse and high-quality solutions for decision makers. In the proposed method, solutions are represented using a bilayer encode scheme, in which the first layer indicates the surface location points and the second layer represents the traveling sequences of target missions. Multiple populations for multiple objectives framework is adopted to efficiently solve the dynamic multiobjective AUV optimization problem. In addition, a recombination-based sampling strategy is developed to improve convergence by fusing the information of multiple populations. Once a change occurs, an incremental response strategy is adopted to generate high-quality solutions for population evolution. Based on the dataset of New Zealand bathymetry, six complex underwater scenarios are constructed with a size of 50 km x 50 kmx 10 km and 400 target missions for tests. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of solution diversity and optimality.