A multi-objective optimization approach for resource assignment and task scheduling problem: Application to maritime domain awareness

Large volume surveillance missions are characterized by the employment of mobile and fixed surveillance assets to a large geographic operation area in order to perform surveillance activities. Finding efficient management solutions should be investigated to optimize assets allocation and tasks achievement. In this paper, we propose to model this optimization problem as a multi-objective, multi-mode assignment and scheduling problem. Resources are to be assigned to accomplish the tasks. Then, surveillance tasks should be scheduled onto successive periods. The problem is designed to consider two conflicting objective functions: minimizing the makespan and minimizing the total cost. As the problem is NP-Hard, a bi-colony ant based approach is proposed. The empirical validation is done using a simulation environment Inform Lab. The experimental results show that the computational time remains polynomial with respect to the problem´s size.