A MILP formulation and a metaheuristic approach for the scheduling of drone landings and payload changes on an automatic platform

We present a mixed-integer linear programming formulation and a metaheuristic approach based on direct search to schedule landings and payload changes of a set of unmanned aerial vehicles that cooperate to achieve given mission objectives. In more detail, such vehicles require landing on an automatic platform able to rapidly substitute batteries and switch the payload they are currently carrying with another one, if required by the mission at hand. Preliminary numerical results are presented to show the effectiveness of the metaheuristic algorithm as a compromise between accuracy of suboptimal solutions and computational effort.