RESEARCH ON AGRICULTURAL LOGISTICS DISTRIBUTION PATH PLANNING CONSIDERING UAV ENDURANCE MILEAGE LIMIT

Abstract

To address the difficulties in logistics distribution in remote rural areas, a systematic planning of agricultural logistics distribution for UAV distribution was performed in this study. Considering the limit of cruising range, from the perspective of green routing, a multi-package distribution path planning model of UAV agricultural logistics considering the limitation of cruising range of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was established to minimize total energy consumption. The task allocation was conducted according to the actual number of UAVs. Meanwhile, a mixed integer nonlinear programming model of task allocation was established. The improved ant colony algorithm was employed to solve the problem. The core idea was to exchange the pheromones of each ant subgroup, and subsequently to apply the insertion-based heuristic method and crossover and inversion operations to optimize the path. For the cases of remote areas in western China, the agricultural UAV distribution path planning considering the mileage limit contributes to saving resources and obtaining the lowest energy consumption distribution path. In addition, for the problem of agricultural logistics distribution path planning considering the mileage limit of UAV, the improved ant colony algorithm exhibits higher solution accuracy than the traditional ant colony algorithm.