VRP of Drones Considering Power Consumption Rate and Wind Effects

Abstract

The drone industry is one of the most important areas of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In the drone industry, delivery systems using drones are now facing commercialization as they have undergone many experiments and discussions. The purpose of this study is to find the best route in a delivery system using a drone. In this study, we have developed the existing Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) into a more realistic mathematical model considering the two differences between drones and vehicles; one is that power consumption varies with the weight of the loaded cargo and the other is that velocity is influenced by wind. This study also presents an Ant Colony System (ACS) algorithm to effectively solve VRP, a well-known NP-hard problem. The methodology of this study is quite successful and is expected to enable more realistic and effective routing decisions.

Keywords

• vehicle routing problem
• drone
• specific power consumption
• wind effects
• ant colony system
• mixed integer non-linear programming