Models and Case Studies for Optimal Deployment and Scheduling of Highway Surveillance Drones

Highway surveillance using drones has recently been introduced for the purpose of handling traffic accidents that occur on highways and cracking down on traffic law violations. However, drone surveillance is still being used for limited times at specific locations. For efficient surveillance of all sections of highways, it is essential to build a platform for drone surveillance. In this paper, we deal with optimization problems to be solved in order to build a systematic platform for highway surveillance using drones. First we consider the problem of determining the optimal deployment of drone stations, which are used as bases for charging and storing drones, and the number of drones to be placed in each drone station. Next, the problem of determining the hourly operation schedule of each deployed drone is dealt with in consideration of the demand for drones that change over time. We propose mixed integer programming models for both problems and show that the proposed models can be successfully applied to real-world instances through a detailed case study of the Gyeongbu highway.