Through urban traffic patrols, problems such as traffic congestion and accidents can be found and dealt with in time to maintain the stability of the urban traffic system. The most common way to patrol is using ground vehicles, which may be inflexible and inefficient. The vehicle–drone coordination maximizes utilizing the flexibility of drones and addresses their limited battery capacity issue. This paper studied a vehicle–drone arc routing problem (VD-ARP), consisting of one vehicle and multiple drones. Considering the coordination mode and constraints of the vehicle–drone system, a mathematical model of VD-ARP that minimized the total patrol time was constructed. To solve this problem, an improved, adaptive, large neighborhood search algorithm (IALNS) was proposed. First, the initial route planning scheme was generated by the heuristic rule of “Drone-First, Vehicle-Then”. Then, several problem-based neighborhood search strategies were embedded into the improved, adaptive, large neighborhood search framework to improve the quality of the solution. The superiority of IALNS is verified by numerical experiments on instances with different scales. Several critical factors were tested to determine the effects of coordinated traffic patrol; an example based on a real road network verifies the feasibility and applicability of the algorithm.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as drones, have been widely used in transmission line inspection and traffic patrolling due to their flexibility and environmental adaptability. To take advantage of drones and overcome their limited endurance, the patrolling tasks are parallelized by concurrently dispatching the drones from a truck which travels on the road network to the nearby task arc. The road network considered in previous research is undirected; however, in reality, the road network usually contains unidirectional arcs, i.e., the road network is asymmetric. Hence, we propose an asymmetric coordinated vehicle-drones arc routing mode for traffic patrolling. In this mode, a truck travelling on an asymmetric road network with multiple drones needs to patrol multiple task arcs, and the drones can be launched and recovered at certain nodes on the truck route, making it possible for drones and the truck to patrol the task in parallel. The total patrol time is the objective function that needs to be minimized given the time limit constraints of drones. The whole problem can be considered as an asymmetric arc routing problem of coordinating a truck and multiple drones. To solve this problem, a large-scale neighborhood search with simulated annealing algorithm (LNS-SA) is proposed. Finally, extensive computation experiments and a real case are carried out. The experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, a detailed sensitivity analysis is performed on several drone-parameters of interest.
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