E. Karagianni, E. Rigas, N. Bassiliades, "Scheduling drones to recharge electric vehicles", 12th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN 2022), Sep 7-9, 2022, Corfu, Greece. ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 22, 1–4.
Author(s): E. Karagianni, E. Rigas, N. Bassiliades
Keywords: scheduling, heuristic, drones, electric vehicles
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Abstract: Drones and Electric Vehicles (EVs) are two technologies that are growing fast and have the potential to revolutionize the transportation sector. In this paper, we take inspiration from a recent patent submitted by Amazon, and we study the problem of scheduling drones that carry a large battery and can partially recharge EVs when a ground charging station is not available. The drones have a limited range, as they are also using an electric motor powered by batteries which need regular recharging. Thus, given a fixed set of drones, the problem that arises is to calculate a schedule for the flying and the recharging of the drones aiming to maximize the number of EVs that are actually serviced. In this vein, we develop a greedy algorithm that uses a heuristic search mechanism. We evaluate our algorithm in a realistic setting and in a plethora of scenarios to verify its effectiveness.