Brief communication: Vehicle routing problem and UAV application in the post-earthquake scenario

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper we simulate unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) recognition after a possible case of diffuse damage after a seismic event in the town of Acireale (Sicily, Italy). Given a set of sites (84 relevant buildings) and the range of the UAV, we are able to find a number of vehicles to employ and the shortest survey path. The problem of finding the shortest survey path is an operational research problem called the vehicle routing problem (VRP). which has a solution that is known to be computationally time-consuming. We used the simulated annealing (SA) heuristic, which is able to provide stable solutions in a relatively short computing time. We also examined the distribution of the cost of the solutions varying the depot on a regular grid in order to find the best area for executing the survey.

Unmanned aerial vehicles/drones in vehicle routing problems: a literature review

“…Humanitarian approaches are directed to solve a problem after a hypothetical disastrous event such as the proposed problems by Cannioto et al. (2017), Oruc and Kara (2018), and Zillies et al. (2016).…”

“…The logistics applications that stand out from the reviewed papers are the ones for parcel delivery and for surveillance and information collection. Besides, this review also found different applications in humanitarian logistics to respond as fast as possible in emergency scenarios including natural disasters, human‐made disastrous incidents, or the delivery of medical supplies (Dorling et al., 2016; Zillies et al., 2016; Cannioto et al., 2017; Oruc and Kara, 2018; Chauhan et al., 2019). Furthermore, some publications also dealt with internal logistics processes of a company during the assembly of products (Olivares et al., 2015) or to gather information of air and soil for agricultural purposes (Tokekar et al., 2016).…”

Optimization Dubins Path of Multiple UAVs for Post-Earthquake Rapid-Assessment

“…To date, there are several notable surveys that outline the previous contributions performed in the field of UAV path planning [8,[13][14][15][16][17][18]. The vehicle routing problem (VRP) model [19] was used to realize load balancing of the task allocation of multi-UAVs, with the optimization objective of minimizing the longest UAV path length. Rathinam et al [20] modeled multi-depot UAV path planning problems as resource allocation problems and introduced the minimum spanning tree method to obtain the shortest path of each UAV.…”

Multi-UAV Rapid-Assessment Task-Assignment Problem in a Post-Earthquake Scenario

“…Multiple objectives, including total trips, maximum trips, and mission time, can be optimized using the model. The vehicle routing problem (VRP) model [30] was used to construct the shortest assessment routes for a fleet of UAVs to visit all point targets in an affected area without considering the UAVs' transport capacity. Moreover, Huang et al [31] used a VRP variant model to solve the path-optimization problem for the rapid distribution of relief materials.…”