Warm-Start 3D ACO Routing with GCS Swarm Health Monitoring under Dynamic Structural Collapse

This preprint presents a warm-start 3D Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) framework for UAV swarm routing in dynamic disaster-response environments. The model routes UAV paths to a fixed Ground Control System (GCS) while considering link quality, communication and propagation delay, and energy usage.

A pheromone warm-start mechanism retains routing information after simulated structural changes rather than restarting optimization from scratch. The framework was evaluated across 75 Monte Carlo trials spanning three levels of structural change(10%, 25%, 50% collapse severity), with performance compared against a greedy nearest-neighbor baseline.

This manuscript is a preprint and has not undergone peer-reviewed publication.