Natural and human-made disasters require effective victim
assistance and last-mile relief supply operations with teams of ground vehicles.
In these applications, digital elevation models (DEM) can provide
accurate knowledge for safe vehicle motion planning but grid representation
results in very large search graphs. Furthermore, travel time, which
becomes a crucial cost optimization criterion, may be affected by inclination
and other challenging terrain characteristics. In this paper, our goal
is to evaluate a search heuristic function based on anisotropic vehicle velocity
restrictions for building the cost matrix required for multi-vehicle
routing on natural terrain and disaster sites. The heuristic is applied to
compute the fastest travel times between every pair of matrix elements
by means of a path planning algorithm. The analysis is based on a case
study on the ortophotographic-based DEM of natural terrain with different
target points, where the