UAV Set Covering Problem for Emergency Network

Abstract

Recent technology allows UAVs to be implemented not only in fields of military, videography, or logistics but also in a social security area, especially for disaster management. UAVs can mount a router and provide a wireless network to the survivors in the network-shadowed area. In this paper, a set covering problem reflecting the characteristics of UAV is defined with a mathematical formulation. An extended formulation and branch-and-price algorithm are proposed for efficient computation. We demonstrated the capability of the proposed algorithm with a computational experiment.