Research On Scheduling And Path Planning For UAV-enabled Delivery In The Smart City

With the flourishing and advancement of the Io T,the smart city has become an emerging paradigm,consisting of ubiquitous sensing,heterogeneous network infrastructure,and intelligent information processing and control systems.Benefiting from the intrinsic flexibility,convenience,and low cost,UAVs have great potentials to be utilized in various civil applications,including parcel delivery.However,suffering from limited payloads and battery capacities,it is uneconomical for UAVs to perform parcel delivery tasks independently.To conquer the drawbacks of low payloads and battery capacities,people propose to simultaneously employ both trucks and drones to construct truck-drone cooperative parcel delivery systems.However,few prior work employed large independent drones,which may cooperate with trucks,to deliver packages from a depot to customers.Such approaches cannot enable the drones to serve remote customers in an economic and efficient way.Although some researchers take into account multiple drones for deliver,there is no optimization according to the practical situation of load balancing,and lack of overall consideration of some restrictions in the actual situation exist,such as synchronous access and dynamic scheduling.Traditional algorithms provide the only solution for the routing problem of a small minority customers.To this end,we comprehensively studies the joint design of scheduling and routing in the logistic distribution scenarios under synchronization and dynamics constraints.It aims to propose a set of theoretical frameworks and implementation methods to jointly optimize scheduling and routing for vehicle-drone cooperation.Therefore,we innovatively propose two new drone collaboration system delivery models:(1)a new hybrid drone-delivery truck collaborative parcel delivery model,wherein M drones carried by M trucks,together with N independent drones,cooperate to deliver parcels to customers distributed in a wide region.(2)The parcel delivery of the public transportation-carried drones includes several drones and public transportation vehicles with lines in urban transportation.The two new delivery system can effectively make use of the complementary advantages of multiple platforms and vehicles,thereby effectively improving the delivery efficiency of the entire delivery system.Aiming at the two UAV cooperative delivery models,we have proposed innovative heuristic algorithms to decompose the problems of route planning and scheduling into several sub-problems and solve them one by one,and objective function model is proposed for optimization.In order to reduce the performance loss caused by the independent optimization at each step.The local search,iterative algorithm and other ways are used among each step by several iteration loops to optimize the overall performance.Finally,the simulation results verify the performance of the two problem models and prove the validity of the algorithm.That is,the hybrid truck-drone cooperative parcel delivery and public transportation-carried drones parcel delivery are conducive to save time,raise energy efficiency,and promote load balancing.