A vehicle routing problem arising in unmanned aerial monitoring

Abstract Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used to perform monitoring tasks both in the military and civilian areas, and the planning of their routes is critical. This study investigates a routing problem in which UAVs monitor a set of areas with different accuracy requirements. This problem is a variant of the classical vehicle routing problem (VRP), where one must determine not only the order in which to visit a set of nodes located in the plane, but also the height at which to visit them, which impacts the accuracy level and the service time. An integer programming model is formulated to optimize flight routes and minimize the total time needed to complete the monitoring tasks. A tabu search metaheuristic is developed for the problem. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to assess the efficiency of the heuristic.