Maximum coverage facility location problem with refueling operationsdrones

With the advancement of technology in today’s industrial world, the use of unmanned deliverydrones is developing and expanding rapidly. Commercial units try to use a drone-based transportationsystem for customer service operations. Due to the importance of this issue, this paper presents amulti-objective mixed integer linear programming formulation with the objectives of maximizingcoverage of demands and minimizing the number of refueling operations. With a set of demandpoints, potential locations of facilities and landing depots, and available drones, the problem is toallocate drones to active facilities to serve as much as possible of the set of demand points. Eachdrone starts its trip from its assigned facility and returns to the landing depot assigned to it afterpassing through the demand points. Along the way, to overcome the limited range of drones, refuelingor battery replacement is considered. To solve the model, a heuristic approach and a genetic algorithmare proposed.

Keywords:

Drone , Maximum coverage , Heuristic method , Genetic algorithm , Mixed integer