Modern applications are increasingly built around networking, collaboration, and automation. Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are a key part of this shift. Many complex missions require multiple UAVs to work together as a team, which means deciding how to group them efficiently is a real optimization challenge. This paper introduces EPICEAg (Enhanced Preference-Inspired Co-Evolutionary Algorithm with goal vectors), a new algorithm for forming optimal UAV teams, called coalitions. EPICEAg builds on an existing algorithm called PICEAg but adds three important improvements: it uses k-medoids clustering through the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) algorithm for more reliable team leader selection, and applies two advanced sorting methods—shift-based density estimation and epsilon-ranking—to manage the complexity of the search. The algorithm optimizes seven goals at once: how well tasks are completed, how efficiently resources are used, how reliable the team and its communications are, how trustworthy the individual drones are, and how much energy they have left. Tests across several mission scenarios show that EPICEAg consistently performs better than PICEAg, NSGA-II, and MOPSO.
Kallil et al. (Sun,) studied this question.