Route planning of truck and multi-drone rendezvous with available time window constraints of drones

During the scenarios of cooperative tasks performed by a single truck and multiple drones,the route plan is prone to failure due to the unpredictable scenario change.In this situation,it is significant to replan the rendezvous route of the truck and drones as soon as possible,to ensure that all drones in flight can return to the truck before running out of energy.This paper addresses the problem of rendezvous route planning of truck and multi-drone.Due to the available time window constraints of drones,which limit not only the rendezvous time of the truck and drones but also the available period of each drone,there are obvious local optimum phenomena in the investigated problem,so it is difficult to find a feasible solution.A two-echelon heuristic algorithm is proposed.In the algorithm,the strategy jumping out of the local optimum and the heuristic generating the initial solution are introduced,to improve the probability and speed of obtaining a feasible solution for the rendezvous route.Simulation results show that the feasible solution of the truck-drones rendezvous route can be obtained with 88%probability in an average of 77 iterations for the scenario involving up to 25 drones.The influence of algorithm options on planning results is also analyzed.