Research on scheduling problem for persistent servive of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles

Aiming at the single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can't finish the task which lasts longer than UAV's maximum cruising duration due to limited battery or fuel. First, a multi-UAV system supported by geographically distributed automatic depots is presented, which can accomplish the long-term or uninterrupted task. Then the mixed integer linear programming model is proposed to formalize the scheduling problem of the multi-UAV system. It can guarantee that each task can get service and minimize the total cost of distance and trip. Finally, the model is verified in Matlab 2014a and it can optimize the objective function and ensure the safety of the UAVs.