Node and Edge Drone Surveillance Problem with Consideration of Required Observation Quality and Battery Replacement

Abstract

Our study introduces a drone routing problem in which drones fly to capture photos for surveillance purposes after a disaster. The drones perform observations on nodes and edges representing populated areas and road segments of a network from multiple altitudes. Each target node and edge requires observation at least once with a certain required quality. When the drones fly at a relatively high altitude, they can simultaneously capture low-quality photos and a large number of observed target nodes and edges. However, high-quality photos and narrow observation areas can be captured from a relatively low altitude. Each drone has a limited battery capacity and thus must return to the depot for battery replacement. This study routes the drones to satisfy the required photo quality of all target nodes and edges while minimizing the makespan of the surveillance by all drones. Our study is the first to examine a multiple-drone routing problem while considering flight altitude-dependent observation quality, battery replacement, node and edge combination, and minimizing the makespan. Our problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. Firefly and adaptive-reactive tabu search algorithms are proposed. The latter outperforms the former and obtains better solutions than those in the MILP model for small-sized instances within a given short computation time.