Abstract
In this paper, a two-echelon cooperated routing problem for the ground vehicle (GV) and its carried unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is investigated, where the GV travels on the road network and its UAV travels in areas beyond the road to visit a number of targets unreached by the GV. In contrast to the classical two-echelon routing problem, the UAV has to launch and land on the GV frequently to change or charge its battery while the GV is moving on the road network. A new 0–1 integer programming model is developed to formulate the problem, where the constraints on the spatial and temporal cooperation of GV and UAV routes are included. Two heuristics are proposed to solve the model: the first heuristic (H1) constructs a complete tour for all targets and splits it by GV routes, while the second heuristic (H2) constructs the GV tour and assigns UAV flights to it. Random instances with six different sizes (25–200 targets, 12–80 rendezvous nodes) are used to test the algorithms. Computational results show that H1 performs slightly better than H2, while H2 uses less time and is more stable.
Highlights
Due to the rapid development in embedded control systems, miniaturization, sensors, and communication technologies in recent decades, a variety of small and low cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are developed as remote sensors, which have been widely used in military and civil areas [1]
In the proposed 2E-GU-RP problem, we aim at optimizing the routes for both the ground vehicle (GV) and UAV, and the two most relevant streams of literature are UAV routing problem and two-echelon location and the two most relevant streams of literature are UAV routing problem and two-echelon location routing problem, which are reviewed as follows
It is possible for the UAV to cover multiple check points in ISR missions. Another important contribution on the optimization for the cooperation of the GV and UAV is the work by Savuran and Karakaya, which investigated the routing problem for an UAV deployed on a GV to conduct ISR missions [9,30]
Summary
Due to the rapid development in embedded control systems, miniaturization, sensors, and communication technologies in recent decades, a variety of small and low cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are developed as remote sensors, which have been widely used in military and civil areas [1]. UAV should be able to to take off from the the UAV moving vehicle complete mission and return to the control [8]. Complete some mission and return to the vehicle automatically. 1, road network and its UAV travels in areas beyond the road for visiting GV-unreachable targets. As the GV carries the 1, UAV, from the takes a round trip base, on thetakes road anetwork and on travels shown in Figure the starts. GV carries thebase, UAV, starts from the round trip the road back to the base. The mission is to minimize the time of the UAV route with its endurance concerned. GV, and planning the UAV’s route for visiting targets during each flight
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
