Planning dissimilar paths for military units

We consider the problem of routing aircraft during mission ingress. The objective is to avoid mission detection – achieved by developing spatially and temporally different paths for the aircraft. To apply the methods developed in this paper we first need to use terrain information to develop a network over which the aircraft are routed. This network development is done using GIS software and some basic rules for link lengths. The routing methodology itself uses concepts from well-studied problems in the OR literature – the p-dispersion problem and the quadratic semi-assignment problem. It also uses Tabu search and other heuristic methods for solving these problems. An example is provided to illustrate the methods and to gain insight into the solutions. Extensive statistical testing is also performed on a case study – developed from a section of Tioga County, New York. Based on the results it appears that the methods are viable in that spatially and temporally different routes can be generated with reasonable computational effort.