Scheduling and Routing of Mobile Charging Vehicles for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Charging

Battery capacity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) limits its ability to perform long-term reconnaissance missions. This paper proposes a model of Mobile Charging Vehicles (MCVs) to charge UAVs on missions. In this scenario, the UAV can land on top of the MCV and move together along its original route. Scheduling and routing of MCVs are optimized to minimize the investment cost and maximize the quality of mission completion while satisfying time- and power-related constraints. For this multi-objective optimization problem, an improved decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA/D) is adopted to solve it. Finally, the effectiveness of this model is verified by numerical experiments.