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A Q-Learning Based Hyper-Heuristic for Generating Efficient UAV Swarming Behaviours

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Intelligent Information and Database Systems (ACIIDS 2021)

Abstract

The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is gradually gaining momentum for commercial applications. These however often rely on a single UAV, which comes with constraints such as its range of capacity or the number of sensors it can carry. Using several UAVs as a swarm makes it possible to overcome these limitations. Many metaheuristics have been designed to optimise the behaviour of UAV swarms. Manually designing such algorithms can however be very time-consuming and error prone since swarming relies on an emergent behaviour which can be hard to predict from local interactions. As a solution, this work proposes to automate the design of UAV swarming behaviours thanks to a Q-learning based hyper heuristic. Experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to obtain efficient swarming heuristics independently of the problem size, thus allowing a fast training on small instances.

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Correspondence to Gabriel Duflo .

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Duflo, G., Danoy, G., Talbi, EG., Bouvry, P. (2021). A Q-Learning Based Hyper-Heuristic for Generating Efficient UAV Swarming Behaviours. In: Nguyen, N.T., Chittayasothorn, S., Niyato, D., Trawiński, B. (eds) Intelligent Information and Database Systems. ACIIDS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12672. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73280-6_61

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73280-6_61

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