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On the Scheduling of Systems of UAVs and Fuel Service Stations for Long-Term Mission Fulfillment

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Abstract

The duration of missions that can be accomplished by a system of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is limited by the battery or fuel capacity of its constituent UAVs. However, a system of UAVs that is supported by automated refueling stations may support long term or even indefinite duration missions. We develop a mixed integer linear program (MILP) model to formalize the problem of scheduling a system of UAVs and multiple shared bases in disparate geographic locations. There are mission trajectories that must be followed by at least one UAV. A UAV may hand off the mission to another in order to return to base for fuel. To address the computational complexity of the MILP formulation, we develop a genetic algorithm to find feasible solutions when a state-of-the-art solver such as CPLEX cannot. In practice, the approach allows for a long-term mission to receive uninterrupted UAV service by successively handing off the task to replacement UAVs served by geographically distributed shared bases.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, KAIST, 373-1 Guseong-dong, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 305-701, Republic of Korea

    Jonghoe Kim, Byung Duk Song & James R. Morrison

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  1. Jonghoe Kim
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  2. Byung Duk Song
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  3. James R. Morrison
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Correspondence to James R. Morrison.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by KAIST HRHRP Grant N10120008.

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Kim, J., Song, B.D. & Morrison, J.R. On the Scheduling of Systems of UAVs and Fuel Service Stations for Long-Term Mission Fulfillment. J Intell Robot Syst 70, 347–359 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-012-9727-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-012-9727-0

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