Highlights of Practical Applications of Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have received attention in the last decade because of their low cost, small size, and program- mable features. Drone delivery is one of the most promising applications to deliver packages efficiently. However, there are still doubts like “How to overcome the drone’s limited capacity and battery life?”. This paper will show a proposal to solve this problem by collaborating a drone deliv- ery system with existing public transportation. A delivery system com- posed by UAVs and buses is a heterogeneous multi-agent system. This study will allocate the tasks to the UAVs and buses in the context of the multi-agent delivery system. Also, this work finds a path for each package by solving the vehicle routing problem (VRP) to find the cost-optimized path given the heterogeneous multi-agent system and minimize the num- ber of UAVs needed for deliver. The experimental results show that the routing algorithm will reduce the total mileage and the number of UAVs given the same set of orders.