| Abstract: |  The problem of protection of critical transportation hubs is of a vital importance for many countries. The recent development in the field of autonomous vehicles technology provides an opportunity to utilize this technology in order to protect these hubs. The Mombasa harbour on the east cost of Africa close to pirate infested waters is one of such places which would greatly benefit from the utilization of the autonomous vehicles for surveillance and ship patrolling.
First, it is shown that problems of area surveillance and of multiple target patrolling can be reduced to patrolling problems on graphs. Second, an optimal algorithm for the area surveillance with polynomial computational complexity is presented. Third, for the multiple target patrolling problem, a formulation of the multiple patroller path problem is proposed. The formulation is based on multiple travelling salesman problem and it is solved using integer linear programming methods. All formulations account for heterogeneous patrolling units. Finally, a multi-agent event-based simulation of Mombasa harbour was created to evaluate presented algorithms.
Results show robustness of the approach as well as scalability to real-world scenarios from the Mombasa harbour.
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