Re-Max: A Reward Maximization Approach for Heterogeneous Drone Scheduling Problem

Over the decade, drones have paved the way into a variety fields including research and commercial applications. A captivating scenario of application is found in the logistics industry, where the collaboration of trucks and drones is seen for boosting last-mile deliveries. In this work, we devise a heterogeneous drone scheduling problem (HDSP), for maximization of rewards or profit. A truck starts from a warehouse with a fleet of heterogeneous drones (varying battery and weight lifting capacity) and packages for delivering to customers. The objective of HDSP is to maximize the reward while also taking into account multiple deliveries can be accomplished using the same drone. We then establish that HDSP is NP-hard problem and formulate an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) for finding the optimal solution. Initial results obtained demonstrate the increase in execution time for higher problem size, for which we further plan to provide heuristic solutions.