Optimization approaches for civil applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or aerial drones: A survey

By Alena Otto, Niels A. H. Agatz, James F. Campbell, Bruce L. Golden, Erwin Pesch. Networks, 2018

888 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or aerial drones, are an emerging technology with significant market potential. UAVs may lead to substantial cost savings in, for instance, monitoring of difficult‐to‐access infrastructure, spraying fields and performing surveillance in precision agriculture, as well as in deliveries of packages. In some applications, like disaster management, transport of medical supplies, or environmental monitoring, aerial drones may even help save lives. In this article, we provide a literature survey on optimization approaches to civil applications of UAVs. Our goal is to provide a fast point of entry into the topic for interested researchers and operations planning specialists. We describe the most promising aerial drone applications and outline characteristics of aerial drones relevant to operations planning. In this review of more than 200 articles, we provide insights into widespread and emerging modeling approaches. We conclude by suggesting promising directions for future research.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f82fe0f8f7ed14cdbdeb28691cd4bc00ceed085

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Citations in the corpus

A compilation of UAV applications for precision agriculture (2020, neutral): “Similarly, Alena Otto et al. in [15] also worked on UAV civil applications by reviewing more than 200 relevant papers.”
Supply, demand, operations, and management of crowd-shipping services: A review and empirical evidence (2019, background): “Advanced technology development may introduce unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones (Bouman et al., 2017; Poikonen et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017; Agatz et al., 2018; Otto et al., 2018), robots, and automated vehicles (Chung et al.”
An adaptive large neighborhood search metaheuristic for the vehicle routing problem with drones (2019, background): “Finally, Otto et al. (2018) present an exhaustive review of optimization problems considering the use of drones for operations planning to civil applications.”
Applications and Research avenues for drone-based models in logistics: A classification and review (2021, background): “While there are a number of structured literature reviews on drone logistics (see, e.g., Otto et al., 2018; Khoufi et al., 2019; Rojas Viloria et al., 2020; Chung et al., 2020; Macrina et al., 2020), none of these existing contributions provides a systematic and scalable classification framework…”
A Comprehensive Survey on the Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem: Applications, Approaches and Taxonomy (2021, background): “The reader may also refer to the survey in [12] that can provide a fast point of entry into the topic of UAVs operations planning for civil applications.”
A Survey on the Convergence of Edge Computing and AI for UAVs: Opportunities and Challenges (2022, background): “Examples include deliveries of deﬁbrillators to treat people that have cardiac arrests not close to hospitals and deliveries of vaccines and blood [132].”
The multiple flying sidekicks traveling salesman problem: Parcel delivery with multiple drones (2020, background): “A survey of the literature on UAVs for civil applications is provided by Otto et al. (2018).”