A Garden–Hydrology–UAV Collaborative Infrastructure and Scheduling Framework Under the Low-Altitude Economy

The rapid growth of the low-altitude economy and urban air mobility (UAM) is reshaping urban transport and infrastructure systems. However, current planning practices still tend to treat green spaces, stormwater facilities, and drone infrastructure as separate subsystems. This paper proposes a Garden Hydrology UAV collaborative infrastructure framework for resilient urban low-altitude logistics and inspection. Pocket parks and sponge city facilities (rain gardens, detention basins) are redesigned as multi-functional UAV bases that integrate take-off/landing and charging with stormwater retention and recreation. A SWMM-based hydrological model provides time-varying inundation and storage states, which are mapped into dynamic node availability constraints for UAV operations, using EPA SWMM 5.2. A multi-objective optimization model is formulated to minimize logistics operation cost, hydrological risk exposure and noise impact on sensitive receptors, while respecting airspace and battery constraints. A stylized 4 km2 high-density district is used to evaluate three scenarios: depot-only operations, garden–UAV integration without hydrological coupling, and the full collaborative framework with SWMM-based node availability and high-precision navigation. Simulation results show that the integrated design reduces makespan by up to 19.7%, energy use by 22.3%, and hydrological risk exposure by 63.4%, while lowering noise exposure by 21.3%, relative to the baseline. The study suggests that garden and sponge city infrastructures can become key physical supports of smart low-altitude networks under the low-altitude economy.