A solution approach for UAV fleet mission planning in changing weather conditions

With a rising demand for utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver materials in outdoor environments, particular attention must be given to all the different aspects influencing the deployment of UAVs for such purposes. These aspects include the characteristics of the UAV fleet (e.g., size of fleet, UAV specifications and capabilities), the energy consumption (highly affected by weather conditions and payload) and the characteristics of the network and customer locations. All these aspects must be taken into account when aiming to achieve deliveries to customers in a safe and timely manner. However, at present, there is a lack of decision support tools and methods for mission planners that consider all these influencing aspects together. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a decomposed solution approach, which provides decision support for UAVs’ fleet mission planning. The proposed approach assists flight mission planners in aerospace companies to select and evaluate different mission scenarios, for which flight-mission plans are obtained for a given fleet of UAVs, while guaranteeing delivery according to customer requirements in a given time horizon. Mission plans are analyzed from multiple perspectives including different weather conditions (wind speed and direction), payload capacities of UAVs, energy capacities of UAVs, fleet sizes, the number of customers visited by a UAV on a mission and delivery performance. The proposed decision support-driven declarative model supports the selection of the UAV mission planning scenarios subject to variations on all these configurations of the UAV system and variations in the weather conditions. The computer simulation based experimental results, provides evidence of the applicability and relevance of the proposed method. This ultimately contributes as a prototype of a decision support system of UAVs fleet-mission planning, able to determine whether is it possible to find a flight-mission plan for a given fleet of UAVs guaranteeing customer satisfaction under the given conditions. The mission plans are created in such a manner that they are suitable to be sent to Air Traffic Control for flight approval.