Title: Drones-aided Asset Maintenance in Hospitals Show Chinese title

Title: 无人机辅助的医院资产维护

Abstract: The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic invoked scientists and researchers to prepare the world for future disasters. During the pandemic, global authorities on healthcare urged the importance of disinfection of objects and surfaces. To implement efficient and safe disinfection services during the pandemic, robots have been utilized for indoor assets. In this paper, we envision the use of drones for disinfection of outdoor assets in hospitals and other facilities. Such heterogeneous assets may have different service demands (e.g., service time, quantity of the disinfectant material etc.), whereas drones have typically limited capacity (i.e., travel time, disinfectant carrying capacity). To serve all the facility assets in an efficient manner, the drone to assets allocation and drone travel routes must be optimized. In this paper, we formulate the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) to find optimal route for each drone such that the total service time is minimized, while simultaneously the drones meet the demands of each asset allocated to it. The problem is solved using mixed integer programming (MIP). As CVRP is an NP-hard problem, we propose a lightweight heuristic to achieve sub-optimal performance while reducing the time complexity in solving the problem involving a large number of assets. Show Chinese abstract

Abstract: 新冠疫情的迅速爆发促使科学家和研究人员为未来灾难做好准备。 在疫情期间，全球卫生当局强调了对物体和表面进行消毒的重要性。 为了在疫情期间提供高效安全的消毒服务，机器人已被用于室内资产。 在本文中，我们设想使用无人机对医院和其他设施的室外资产进行消毒。 这些异构资产可能有不同的服务需求（例如，服务时间、消毒材料的数量等），而无人机通常具有有限的容量（即，飞行时间、携带消毒剂的能力）。 为了高效地服务所有设施资产，必须优化无人机与资产的分配以及无人机的行驶路线。 在本文中，我们将容量限制的车辆路径问题（CVRP）进行公式化，以找到每架无人机的最佳路线，从而最小化总服务时间，同时确保无人机满足其分配到的每个资产的需求。 该问题使用混合整数规划（MIP）求解。 由于CVRP是一个NP难问题，我们提出了一种轻量级启发式算法，在减少涉及大量资产的问题求解时间复杂度的同时，实现次优性能。