6,939 research outputs found
Design of Ad Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks Formed by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Advanced Mechanical Automation
Ad hoc wireless mesh networks formed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
equipped with wireless transceivers (access points (APs)) are increasingly
being touted as being able to provide a flexible "on-the-fly" communications
infrastructure that can collect and transmit sensor data from sensors in
remote, wilderness, or disaster-hit areas. Recent advances in the mechanical
automation of UAVs have resulted in separable APs and replaceable batteries
that can be carried by UAVs and placed at arbitrary locations in the field.
These advanced mechanized UAV mesh networks pose interesting questions in terms
of the design of the network architecture and the optimal UAV scheduling
algorithms. This paper studies a range of network architectures that depend on
the mechanized automation (AP separation and battery replacement) capabilities
of UAVs and proposes heuristic UAV scheduling algorithms for each network
architecture, which are benchmarked against optimal designs.Comment: 12 page
A nonmonotone GRASP
A greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) is an itera-
tive multistart metaheuristic for difficult combinatorial optimization problems. Each
GRASP iteration consists of two phases: a construction phase, in which a feasible
solution is produced, and a local search phase, in which a local optimum in the
neighborhood of the constructed solution is sought. Repeated applications of the con-
struction procedure yields different starting solutions for the local search and the
best overall solution is kept as the result. The GRASP local search applies iterative
improvement until a locally optimal solution is found. During this phase, starting from
the current solution an improving neighbor solution is accepted and considered as the
new current solution. In this paper, we propose a variant of the GRASP framework that
uses a new “nonmonotone” strategy to explore the neighborhood of the current solu-
tion. We formally state the convergence of the nonmonotone local search to a locally
optimal solution and illustrate the effectiveness of the resulting Nonmonotone GRASP
on three classical hard combinatorial optimization problems: the maximum cut prob-
lem (MAX-CUT), the weighted maximum satisfiability problem (MAX-SAT), and
the quadratic assignment problem (QAP)
Solving the vehicle routing problem with lunch break arising in the furniture delivery industry
In this paper we solve the Vehicle Routing Problem with Lunch Break (VRPLB)
which arises when drivers must take pauses during their shift, for example,
for lunch breaks. Driver breaks have already been considered in long haul
transportation when drivers must rest during their travel, but the underlying
optimization problem remains difficult and few contributions can be found for
less than truckload and last mile distribution contexts. This problem, which
appears in the furniture delivery industry, includes rich features such as time
windows and heterogeneous vehicles. In this paper we evaluate the performance
of a new mathematical formulation for the VRPLB and of a fast and high
performing heuristic. The mixed integer linear programming formulation has
the disadvantage of roughly doubling the number of nodes, and thus significantly
increasing the size of the distance matrix and the number of variables. Consequently,
standard branch-and-bound algorithms are only capable of solving small-sized
instances. In order to tackle large instances provided by an industrial partner,
we propose a fast multi-start randomized local search heuristic tailored for the
VRPLB, which is shown to be very efficient. Through a series of computational
experiments, we show that solving the VRPLB without explicitly considering the
pauses during the optimization process can lead to a number of infeasibilities.
These results demonstrate the importance of integrating drivers pauses in the
resolution process
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