Scheduling Landing and Payload Switch of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on a Single Automatic Platform

We focus on the problem of optimally managing a set of unmanned aerial vehicles performing given missions that require to land on an automatic platform, unmount the currently-carried payload, and take off with another payload to complete mission objectives. Such a problem often arises when swarms of drones cooperate to complete monitoring applications or other tasks requiring an efficient schedule of landings and payload switches in a resource-constrained environment. First, the problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming one, which, however, may be complex to be solved for a large number of drones. Thus, we also propose a heuristic algorithm able to find suboptimal solutions with a reduced computational effort. Preliminary simulation results are reported and discussed.