Locating unmanned aircraft systems for multiple missions under different weather conditions

Motivated by the increasing civilian use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), this paper considers the simultaneous location and routing of UAVs for multiple missions and different weather conditions. We include modeling and computational experience inspired by requirements for air surveillance by the Turkish government’s public agencies. We model these demands in multiple mission areas and consider the impact of different weather conditions on the ability to employ UAVs from different geographic locations. We formulate the problem as a two-stage stochastic integer linear program with recourse and get an optimal solution for realistic test instances in a reasonable amount of time using decomposition by weather and mission combinations. We also introduce an optimization-based heuristic with bounds based on our decomposition for larger test instances.