Bypassing or flying above the obstacles? A novel multi-objective UAV path planning problem

This study proposes a novel multi-objective integer programming model for a collision-free discrete drone path planning problem. Considering the possibility of bypassing obstacles or flying above them, this study aims to minimize the path length, energy consumption, and the accumulated maximum path risk simultaneously. The static environment is represented as 3D grid cells. Due to the NP-hardness nature of the problem, several state-of-the-art evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) algorithms with customized crossover and mutation operators are applied to find a set of non-dominated solutions. The results show the effectiveness of applied algorithms in solving several generated test cases.