Intelligent computational methods for multi-unmanned aerial vehicle-enabled autonomous mobile edge computing systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled autonomous mobile edge computing (MEC) system, in which several UAVs are deployed to provide services to user devices (UDs). The aim is to reduce/minimize the overall energy consumption of the autonomous system via designing the optimal trajectories of multiple UAVs. The problem is very complicated to be solved by traditional methods, as one has to take into account the deployment updation of stop points (SPs), the association of SPs with UDs and UAVs, and the optimal trajectories designing of UAVs. To tackle this problem, we propose a variable-length trajectory planning algorithm (VLTPA) consisting of three phases. In the first phase, the deployment of SPs is updated via presenting a genetic algorithm (GA) having variable-length individuals. Accordingly, the association between UDs and SPs is addressed by using a close rule. Finally, a multi-chrome GA is proposed to jointly handle the association of SPs with UAVs and their order for UAVs. The proposed VLTPA is tested via performing extensive experiments on eight instances ranging from 60 to 200 UDs, which reveal that the proposed VLTPA outperforms other compared state-of-the-art algorithms.