Routing and scheduling of unmanned aerial vehicles subject to cyclic production flow constraints

Abstract

The focus is on a production system in which material handling operations are carried out by a fleet of UAVs. The problem formulated for the considered case of cyclic multi-product batch production flow is a material handling cost problem. To solve this problem, it is necessary to designate the routes and the corresponding schedules for vehicles that make up the given UAV fleet. The aim is to find solutions that minimizes both the UAV downtime and the takt time of the cyclic production flow in which operations are performed by the UAVs. A declarative model of the analyzed case was used. This approach allows us to view the problem as a constraint satisfaction problem and to solve it in the OzMozart constraint programming environment.