A Drone Routing Problem for Ship Emission Detection Considering Simultaneous Movements

Abstract

Offshore ships’ emission has a tremendous environmental and healthy impact on the port cities and citizens, even though the Emission Control Area (ECA) policy imposes legislative constraints on the ships. It is challenging to detect ships with illegal emissions using traditional administrative and enforcement methods. In addition to a system of ships’ emission detection, a drone-based detection system is investigated, and a drone routing problem is formulated considering the distinct feature: the drone flying while ships move simultaneously. A nonlinear program is devised, and heuristics algorithms are developed to solve the test instances. The numerical experiments demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of using drone routing solutions. The solution algorithm can solve large samples with 50 ships within 2 s, and the computing time is almost linear to the number of ships. The proposed model and algorithms should contribute to drone-based ship emission detection and a featured routing problem.