Research Information System
33rd European Conference on Operational Research (EURO 2024), Kobenhavn, Denmark, 30 June - 03 July 2024, pp.55
This study focuses on the deployment of a fleet of drones required to
provide temporary communication during emergencies. It is assumed
that drones are initially placed at a depot, while the area is divided
into subregions that require continuous communication services. In
addition, each drone is subject to battery limitations and thus, needs
to return to the depot to recharge its battery. As emergency commu-
nication is a continuous activity, drones need to visit the subregions
in a sequence. The aim here is to provide continuous coverage of the
area by utilizing drones and their limited batteries efficiently. The first
aspect of interest is how long a drone should hover over a subregion.
Hence, it is aimed to keep each drone as much as possible over every
visited subregion, to ensure maximum coverage. Decisions include
the selection of visited subregions, the optimal hovering time of each
drone over the subregions, and the scheduling of the subregion visit
sequence, all aimed at maximizing temporal and spatial coverage. The
problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) re-
sembling the covering tour problem. This mathematical model enables
us to model the complex interplay between drone movements, area
coverage, and battery constraints. Furthermore, a constraint program-
ming (CP) model is proposed to solve the problem and computational
experiments are conducted to assess the performance of the CP and
MILP models on randomly generated large-scale instances.