Copyright © 2011 Giovanni Giardini and Tamás Kalmár-Nagy. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a combinatorial planner for autonomous systems. The approach is demonstrated on the so-called subtour problem, a variant of the classical traveling salesman problem (TSP): given a set of possible goals/targets, the optimal strategy is sought that connects goals. The proposed solution method is a Genetic Algorithm coupled with a heuristic local search. To validate the approach, the method has been benchmarked against TSPs and subtour problems with known optimal solutions. Numerical experiments demonstrate the success of the approach.