MULTI-FLIGHT ALGORITHMS FOR MULTI-UAV ARC ROUTING PROBLEM

Abstract

Icy roads can cause many accidents due to their slippery nature. Thus, providingpeople the information about icy roads can help them avoid taking these roads and prevent accidents. The problem of routing UAVs optimally to collect visual information regarding icy roads is called Icy Road Vehicle Routing Problem. Vehicle Routing Problem is essentially a path planning problem, where optimal paths need to be determined for one or more vehicles. Arc Routing Problems is a subclass of vehicle routing problems where the goal is to make vehicle(s) traverse specific arcs or edges optimally. Icy road vehicle routing problem resembles arc routing problem when icy roads are considered as arcs. Usually, in arc routing problems, vehicle(s) are located in one specific location, and the solution routes start and end at the same location. This thesis defines the Icy Road Vehicle Routing Problem, a new type of arc routing problem, where the goal of traversing arcs or icy roads remains the same but vehicle(s) or UAV(s) are located at one or multiple location(s). The thesis also presents new heuristic- based algorithms called multi-flight algorithms to solve the Icy Road Vehicle Routing Problem. By performing a set of experiments, the proposed algorithms are compared against several heuristic-based approaches from the literature. These experimental results show that the proposed multi-flight algorithms produced quicker and better quality solution routes to the UAVs for the Icy Road Vehicle Routing Problem than previous heuristics.