Solving the probabilistic drone routing problem - searching for victims in the aftermath of disasters
Résumé
Several major industrial disasters happen each year around the world. They usually
involve limited accessibility, poor ground conditions and toxic wastes. As a consequence, this
reduces the efficiency of humanitarian operations. In such a context, flying drones may be a
viable alternative: faster, no dependency on ground conditions, and larger areas scanned. They
are also better suited for following the population and the crisis dynamic. For such a purpose,
various issues have to be addressed such as defining and optimizing the drone’s routes, their
energy consumption, choosing the relay points for recharging equipment, among others. In
this study, several additional features from existing works are considered: first, a probability
of identifying individuals is defined. Thus, each node can be scanned several times in order to
improve the observation. In addition, the nodes are prioritized according to a given heatmap.
The Probabilistic Drone Routing Problem (PDRP) consists of finding a route, i.e. a sequence
of trips, for each drone such that the sum of the expected number of identified individuals on
all routes is maximized. Constraints on energy consumption, collision avoidance and drone-
base assignment are considered. We propose a heuristic and metaheuristics based on the
Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for the PDRP. The methods are tested on theoretical
instances, as well as on a case study of the Beirut Port explosion on August 4, 2020, in order
to analyze the performance of the proposed methods.
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