Abstract
Our study introduces a drone routing problem in which drones fly to capture photos for surveillance purposes after a disaster. The drones perform observations on nodes and edges representing populated areas and road segments of a network from multiple altitudes. Each target node and edge requires observation at least once with a certain required quality. When the drones fly at a relatively high altitude, they can simultaneously capture low-quality photos and a large number of observed target nodes and edges. However, high-quality photos and narrow observation areas can be captured from a relatively low altitude. Each drone has a limited battery capacity and thus must return to the depot for battery replacement. This study routes the drones to satisfy the required photo quality of all target nodes and edges while minimizing the makespan of the surveillance by all drones. Our study is the first to examine a multiple-drone routing problem while considering flight altitude-dependent observation quality, battery replacement, node and edge combination, and minimizing the makespan. Our problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. Firefly and adaptive-reactive tabu search algorithms are proposed. The latter outperforms the former and obtains better solutions than those in the MILP model for small-sized instances within a given short computation time.
Highlights
As a type of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones are used for various purposes, such as parcel delivery, surveillance, and entertainment purposes
The drones can conduct these observations from points or arcs at any multiple altitudes [8], [9]
The surveillance time can be minimized by performing the observations at appropriate altitudes, such as relatively low altitudes to reduce the required travel times and high altitudes to observe more target nodes and edges simultaneously and reduce the number of points requiring visits
Summary
As a type of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones are used for various purposes, such as parcel delivery, surveillance, and entertainment purposes. A multiple drone point-and-arc-routing problem for post-disaster surveillance is introduced. Flying the drones at a high altitude can only capture low-quality photos but enables the drones to observe more target nodes and edges simultaneously. Our study is the first to examine the drone routing problem at more than one altitude for node and edge observation, considering the required observation quality and battery replacement. Multiple observations of target nodes and edges are possible from a single point visited by a drone. And adaptive–reactive tabu search (ARTS) algorithms are developed to solve the problem. The firefly algorithm can effectively search for new solutions because of the automatic subdivision process [19].
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