Unmanned aerial vehicle inspection routing and scheduling for engineering management

Technological advances in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have enabled the extensive application of UAVs in various industrial domains. For example, UAV-based inspection in engineering management is a more efficient means of searching for hidden dangers in high-risk construction environments than traditional inspections in the artifactual field. Against the above background, this paper investigates the optimization of the UAV inspection routing and scheduling problem. A mixed-integer linear programming model is devised to optimize decisions on the assignment of inspection tasks, the monitoring sequence schedule, and charge decisions. The comprehensive consideration of no-fly zones, monitoring-interval time windows and multiple monitoring rounds distinguish the devised problem from the typical vehicle routing problem and make the mathematical model intractable for a commercial solver in the case of large-scale instances. Thus, a tailored variable neighborhood search metaheuristic is designed to solve the model efficiently. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm for large-scale and real-scale instances. In addition, sensitivity experiments and a case study based on an engineering project are conducted to derive insights that will enable an engineering manager to improve the efficiency of inspection works