A Design of a Scheduling System for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Deployment

Deriving a detailed schedule for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) deployment involves a wide range of scheduling problems, where solving them as a whole is intractable. Moreover, uncertainties in operational environments of the UAV deployment bring a gap between models assumed for the scheduling problems and an actual system. Motivated by the facts, we propose a conceptual design of a scheduling system for a UAV deployment. Specifically we first introduce fundamental scheduling problems for UAV deployments and specify dependencies between them. A design for a scheduling system, which sequentially solves the scheduling problems and evaluates the solutions using a simulation model, is then proposed. Finally, a prototype of the scheduling system implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the design is described.