Multiperiod Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Path Planning With Dynamic Emergency Priorities for Geohazards Monitoring

Advances in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology provide an opportunity for geohazards monitoring in harsh environments, thereby reducing man-hours and corresponding risks. Due to the limited duration, UAV can hardly visit all the scattered geohazard sites (GSs) in one trip. Therefore, GSs with higher emergency priorities should be monitored first in earlier trips. In this article, we formulate a multiperiod UAVs path planning problem with dynamic emergency priorities for monitoring GSs, in which the emergency levels of GSs change dynamically according to the latest disaster information. An effective solution strategy for this problem selects GSs that must be monitored and accesses more optional GSs within the limited UAV's duration time, after distinguishing them according to emergency priorities. We therefore propose a heuristic algorithm based on the adaptive large neighborhood search. We finally present a real-world case for demonstration and validation.