A Greedy Heuristic Based on Optimizing Battery Consumption and Routing Distance for Transporting Blood Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play crucial roles in numerous applications, such as healthcare services. For example, UAVs can help in disaster relief and rescue missions, such as by delivering blood samples and medical supplies. In this work, we studied a problem related to the routing of UAVs in a healthcare approach known as the UAV-based Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (UCVRP). This is classified as an NP-hard problem. The problem deals with utilizing UAVs to deliver blood to patients in emergency situations while minimizing the number of UAVs and the total routing distance. The UCVRP is a variant of the well-known capacitated vehicle routing problem, with additional constraints that fit the shipment type and the characteristics of the UAV. To solve this problem, we developed a heuristic known as the Greedy Battery—Distance Optimizing Heuristic (GBDOH). The idea was to assign patients to a UAV in such a way as to minimize the battery consumption and the number of UAVs. Then, we rearranged the patients of each UAV in order to minimize the total routing distance. We performed extensive experiments on the proposed GBDOH using instances tested by other methods in the literature. The results reveal that GBDOH demonstrates a more efficient performance with lower computational complexity and provides a better objective value by approximately 27% compared to the best methods used in the literature.