Approximation Algorithms for Drone Delivery Scheduling Problem
The coordination among drones and ground vehicles for last-mile delivery has gained significant interest in recent years. In this paper, we study multiple drone delivery scheduling problem(MDSP) <cit.> for last-mile delivery, where we have a set of drones with an identical battery budget and a set of delivery locations, along with reward or profit for delivery, cost and delivery time intervals. The objective of the MDSP is to find a collection of conflict-free schedules for each drone such that the total profit for delivery is maximum subject to the battery constraint of the drones. Here we propose a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the single drone delivery scheduling problem (SDSP) and a 1/4-approximation algorithm for MDSP with a constraint on the number of drones.
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