Joint Energy and Completion Time Difference Minimization for UAV-Enabled Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Constrained Multi-Objective Optimization Approach

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled intelligent transportation system utilizes a set of UAVs to collect and process surveillance data for transportation management. Subsequently, the processing results of the UAVs are transmitted to a control center that makes a centralized transportation management decision based on the fusion of all processing results. When performing the monitoring tasks, the UAVs can access to an edge server for offloading. To reduce the energy consumption and improve the fusion performance, the control center schedules the UAVs to perform the tasks in an energy-efficient manner while synchronizing the completion time of the UAVs. As a result, the control center studies a constrained multi-objective optimization problem (CMOP), in which two objectives, i.e., the total energy consumption of the UAVs and total completion time difference among the UAVs, are simultaneously considered. To tackle the CMOP, we develop an improved constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. Particularly, we design an improved genetic operator and repairing constraint-handling technique to improve the overall performance of the proposed algorithm in seeking Pareto optimal solutions for the CMOP. Numerical results demonstrate that compared with the baseline algorithms, the proposed algorithm has great advantages in finding better solutions with the enhanced diversity and convergence for the CMOP.