2017/11/13 by Saravanan Venkatachalam, Venkatachalam, Saravanan, Kaarthik Sundar +3 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Engineering · #FOS: Mathematics #Facility Location and Emergency Management #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Optimization and Search Problems #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Vehicle Routing Optimization Methods
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1711.04936
openalex publication_date 2017/11/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The past decade has seen a substantial increase in the use of small unmanned\naerial vehicles (UAVs) in both civil and military applications. This article\naddresses an important aspect of refueling in the context of routing multiple\nsmall UAVs to complete a surveillance or data collection mission. Specifically,\nthis article formulates a multiple-UAV routing problem with the refueling\nconstraint of minimizing the overall fuel consumption for all of the vehicles\nas a two-stage stochastic optimization problem with uncertainty associated with\nthe fuel consumption of each vehicle. The two-stage model allows for the\napplication of sample average approximation (SAA). Although the SAA solution\nasymptotically converges to the optimal solution for the two-stage model, the\nSAA run time can be prohibitive for medium- and large-scale test instances.\nHence, we develop a tabu-search-based heuristic that exploits the model\nstructure while considering the uncertainty in fuel consumption. Extensive\ncomputational experiments corroborate the benefits of the two-stage model\ncompared to a deterministic model and the effectiveness of the heuristic for\nobtaining high-quality solutions.\n