The Drone Routing Problem For Regular Monitoring In An Emission Control Area

Shipping is an important transport method,but at the same time it causes large amounts of exhausted gases,which can have serious influences on the natural environment and public health.This is due to the too much use of heavy oil,which is cheaper than low sulphur oil.Relevant international groups and governments have established several Emission Control Areas(ECA),where vessels should obey the rules to use cleaner oil.In order to enforce the ECA regulations,some methods have been adopted in the practical applications.Using drones are one of the best ways since they work in an automatic style and can transfer real-time information accurately and overcome geographic barriers.Because the fixed cost of purchasing drones and variable cost of using drones are still high,we should optimize the operations and routes of drones.In this dissertation,we describe our problem in detail and emphasise the differences with other problems.Then we propose two Mixed Integer Linear Programming(MILP)models,which can be solved directly by the state-of-the-art solver such as Cplex.Also,in order to solve this problem efficiently,the specific Tabu search method is developed.Lastly,some numerical experiments and sensitivity analyses are conducted,which show that our algorithms are very effective and efficient.The research in this dissertation is meaningful since it can help enforce ECA regulations in an efficient and low-cost way.