Maximizing the Average Environmental Benefit of a Fleet of Drones under a Periodic Schedule of Tasks

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones) are not just a technological achievement based on modern ideas of artificial intelligence; they also provide a sustainable solution for green technologies in logistics, transport, and material handling. In particular, using battery-powered UAVs to transport products can significantly decrease energy and fuel expenses, reduce environmental pollution, and improve the efficiency of clean technologies through improved energy-saving efficiency. We consider the problem of maximizing the average environmental benefit of a fleet of drones given a periodic schedule of tasks performed by the fleet of vehicles. To solve the problem efficiently, we formulate it as an optimization problem on an infinite periodic graph and reduce it to a special type of parametric assignment problem. We exactly solve the problem under consideration in O(n3) time, where n is the number of flights performed by UAVs.