Optimal path planning for vehicles under navigation relayed by multiple stations

The navigation relayed by multiple stations (NRMS) is an advanced cooperative navigation technology which relies on multiple different stations to sequentially guide a vehicle to its destination. This paper addresses the optimal path planning problem for the vehicle navigated by the NRMS technology (OPPV- NRMS) which is a challenging hierarchical mixed-variable constrained optimization problem involving two coupling levels. To solve OPP-V-NRMS, we present two decoupling methods: the accurate method and the approximation method. The accurate method performs path planning for all possible arrangements, which is accurate but time-consuming. The approximation method only selects a few arrangements for path planning, which achieves a better tradeoff between solution quality and computational cost. In both decoupling methods, a differential evolution based (DE-based) path planning algorithm is proposed for path planning. Comparative experiments show that both methods can find a feasible and high-quality path for the vehicle while the approximation method brings about much lower computational cost.