Aerial Path Planning for Multi-Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are a potential solution to fast and cost efficient package delivery services. There are two types of UAVs, namely fixed wing (UAV-FW) and rotor wing (UAV-RW), which have their own advantages and drawbacks. In this paper we aim at providing different solutions to a collaborating multi-agent scenario combining both UAVs types. We show the problem can be reduced to the facility location problem (FLP) and propose two local search algorithms to solve it: Tabu search and simulated annealing.

I. Introduction

The last stage of a logistics process is called last-mile delivery, where the goods are delivered from the distribution centre to the customer. Fast delivery approaches are critical to customer satisfaction [1]. Therefore, faster and cheaper solutions, such as using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for last-mile delivery are catching attention [2].