Monitoring oil pipeline infrastructures with multiple unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

Effective monitoring of oil pipeline systems is an important task due to a very high environmental cost of an undetected oil spill. For this task, we focus on the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and we formalize the problem of optimal pipeline monitoring with multiple mobile agents as a mathematical program which captures properties of the problem, including environmental sensitivity and motion constraints of the UAVs. We design two algorithmic extensions which push inherent scalability limits of this problem. Finally, we show that even with limited scalability, we are able to find optimal solutions for real-world sized problems and show a promising way to approximately solve larger scenarios. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.