Two-step procedure of optimisation for flight planning problem for airborne LiDAR data acquisition (Q462653)

Summary: Flight planning for airborne LiDAR data collection determines flight parameters, which in turn control the flight duration. While the former ensures desired quality of captured data the cost of the project is directly affected by the latter. This paper attempts to optimize flight planning problem. The flight duration is expressed as an objective function and the associated data requirements, preferences and limitations of flight planning problem are considered as constraints. Due to the typical characteristics of flight duration and flight parameters, a two-step procedure of optimization that consists of Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Hooke and Jeeve's (HJ) method of optimization are adopted. The two-step procedure alleviates the pitfalls of both GA and HJ method and successfully determines the optimal flight planning parameters for a fairly complicated problem. Results obtained in this paper demonstrate that the proposed two-step procedure can be used for solving complex engineering problems like flight planning.