Drone mission planning in hard-to-reach areas to provide time-critical humanitarian supply

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Alf Kimms
• Subject Area: Operations Management and Computer Science for Business Administration
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552893623

Supplying people in hard-to-reach areas with medicine, food and other relief supplies is an important aspect of disaster management. Drones have recently been used here as for example reports from the World Food Program show. The company Zipline for example uses its drones to deliver vaccinations and other medical products to hard-to-reach doctors' surgeries and hospitals in Rwanda and Ghana, among other places. On the technical side, there are developments towards converting \glqq normal'' cars so that they can also act as take-off and landing points for drones while driving. Therefore, a planning problem of the following kind will become increasingly relevant in the future: Drones are brought closer to the destination by vehicles and fly off the vehicle at a point to be determined. The drones navigate through a field of obstacles and fulfil the delivery. The drones then fly to the same or another vehicle and land on it. Here the batteries are changed and new goods are loaded. The drone then sets off for the next destination until all destinations have been supplied. It must be ensured that the drones do not collide with obstacles which block their paths especially in disaster areas. The trade-off between drone velocity and energy consumption must also be taken into account. Engineering studies show that the energy consumption of drones is not linearly and not monotonically dependent on velocity. The aim is to fulfil the deliveries as early as possible. A drone-relay problem in which the drones fly from vehicle to vehicle until they can reach their destination is also conceivable. The drone's battery is changed at each vehicle, meaning that longer distances can generally be covered at greater velocities. A network of vehicles of this kind means that deliveries can be made more quickly, especially in areas with poor infrastructure. When using a drone with several destinations, the problem of determining the order in which the destinations are to be supplied arises. With several drones there are allocation problems such as which drone supplies which demand location and which vehicles supply which drones with new batteries and goods.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants