AI-Enabled Trajectory Optimization of Logistics UAVs With Wind Impacts in Smart Cities

AI-enabled logistics unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are progressively revealing their unique advantages for future smart cities. Nevertheless, the existing research on logistics UAV path planning lacks to simultaneously consider the UAV energy consumption constraints, the customer time windows, the impacts of wind speed and direction. This omission renders the existing models inappropriate for real-world transportation systems. Besides, the UAVs are still constrained by the limited payload and battery due to the highly automatic delivery process. Consequently, we investigate the effect of wind speed and direction on UAV flight states, establishes pertinent parameters and their resolution methods impacted by wind conditions, and delves into the logistics UAV path planning issue that concurrently considers the UAV energy consumption constraints, the customer time windows, and the impact of wind conditions. To resolve the proposed trajectory optimization issue, the large-scale neighborhood search algorithm (LNS) is amalgamated with the genetic algorithm (GA), forming the GA-LNS, to address the static problem, while dynamic planning concepts are employed in the decoding process of GA-LNS to solve the dynamic trajectory optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the devised algorithms yield superior solutions within a plausible timeframe, reducing distribution costs by approximately 9% in comparison to the conventional GA. Unlike the no-wind and static scenarios, path planning that incorporates dynamic wind conditions circumvents issues related to energy constraints and customer satisfaction bias evident in the prior cases. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can provide a high-efficiency, low-energy-consumption, and low-delay UAV planning strategy in the scenario of UAV-assisted data collection.