Maximum coverage facility location problem with refueling operations drones

With the advancement of technology in today’s industrial world, the use of unmanned delivery drones is developing and expanding rapidly. Commercial units try to use a drone-based transportation system for customer service operations. Due to the importance of this issue, this paper presents a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming formulation with the objectives of maximizing coverage of demands and minimizing the number of refueling operations. With a set of demand points, potential locations of facilities and landing depots, and available drones, the problem is to allocate drones to active facilities to serve as much as possible of the set of demand points. Each drone starts its trip from its assigned facility and returns to the landing depot assigned to it after passing through the demand points. Along the way, to overcome the limited range of drones, refueling or battery replacement is considered. To solve the model, a heuristic approach and a genetic algorithm are proposed.