Drone Scheduling for Monitoring Ship Emissions

Return

The use of drones to monitor the air emissions of vessels has recently attracted wide attention. We study a drone scheduling problem that determines the sequence of vessels to monitor by each drone. The objective is to design a group of flight tours for drones such that as many vessels as possible can be inspected during a given time period while prioritizing highly weighted vessels for inspection. This problem is different from the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in that the vessels are moving, whose trajectories can be predicted based on ship AIS data. We formulate the problem on a time-expanded network and develop an effective Lagrangian relaxation-based method. We apply the research to ship monitoring in the Pearl River Delta to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This research is sponsored by the Environment and Conservation Fund of the Environmental Protection Department of HKSAR.

In case of enquiries or feedback, please contact Professor Shuaian (Hans) Wang at hans.wang@polyu.edu.hk