Vehicle Routing Problem When Using UAVs

Abstract

Introduction. In recent years, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly. Initially introduced for military purposes, drones and related technologies have been successfully switched to a number of new civilian applications in the last few years, such as delivery, logistics, surveillance, entertainment, and more. They also opened up new opportunities, such as working in difficult or dangerous areas. The UAV has the potential to solve the problem of air mobility, allowing to change transport and logistics in the future. Combining UAVs with traditional land vehicles can solve the last-mile delivery problem by achieving significant improvements in distribution costs and speed of vehicle delivery. One of the biggest challenges is to plan UAV routes with a number of constraints, including time, distance or energy costs, cargo weight, environmental and environmental conditions (such as wind direction or obstacles), UAV battery life, and demand requirements. users you want to visit. Thus, it revealed the need to classify different types of research and study the general characteristics of the study area. This article aims to help identify the main topics and new areas of research, as well as provides a published overview of the current state and contribution to the problem of UAV routing, as well as a general categorization of the problem of vehicle routing (VRP). The purpose of the paper is to analyze the scientific contributions to the problem of UAV routing to determine the main characteristics of these problems, as well as trends in research and recent improvements. Results. Sources are classified according to the areas of application of UAVs; methods that include exact, heuristic, metaheuristic, and mixed algorithms are mentioned. Conclusions. An overview of the work on routing problems using UAVs and the tasks they generate, trends in research and recent developments. Keywords: Unmanned aerial vehicle, routing, vehicle, optimization.