Route Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles under Recharging and Mission Time Constraints

Kriangsak Phalapanyakoon,Peerapon Siripongwutikorn

doi:10.33889/ijmems.2021.6.5.087

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of route planning for rechargeable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) under the mission time constraint in cases where more than one trip per round is required due to limited battery capacities. The goal is to determine the number of UAVs to be deployed and the flying paths that minimize the total mission cost. Unlike previous works, the electric cost incurred by UAV recharging proportional to actual flying distances is incorporated into our model. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer programming model to minimize the sum of electric charging cost, the UAV usage cost, and the penalty cost from the violation of the mission time constraint. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to examine the integrity and performance of the proposed model under various model parameters and deployment scenarios in grid areas and a real terrain area. The optimal solutions can be obtained for small-scale problem instances in a reasonable runtime. For large-scale problems, only feasible solutions can be obtained due to limited computational resources.

Highlights

Due to the rapid development of transportation technology over the past few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have proven beneficial in terms of cost and time efficiency, especially in areas inaccessible to humans (Joshi, 2019)
Among the three objective function coefficients, the total cost is most sensitive to the time penalty unit cost but least sensitive to the energy unit cost, and there exists the synergetic effect between the time penalty unit cost and the UAV unit cost
In this research, the problem of route planning of multiple rechargeable UAVs flying multiple trips and rounds to cover the set of predefined locations under mission time constraints is introduced and studied as a novel approach for route planning of a rechargeable electric fleet of UAVs

Summary

Introduction

Due to the rapid development of transportation technology over the past few years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have proven beneficial in terms of cost and time efficiency, especially in areas inaccessible to humans (Joshi, 2019). Non-optimal planning of the flying paths can result in an unnecessarily high cost from UAV charging and usages and excessive time in completing missions. The model of route planning for rechargeable UAVs is crucial to obtain the optimal solution with minimum total mission cost. UAV recharging incurs an electricity cost that depends on the remaining UAV energy before recharging when returning to the base, and the recharging time adds to the total mission time. For the same coverage area, deploying more UAVs will shorten the mission time and results in less charging time at the expense of a higher UAV usage cost. A time constraint is specified for Phalapanyakoon & Siripongwutikorn: Route Planning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles under Recharging

Objectives

Results

Conclusion