Battery assignment and scheduling for drone delivery businesses

Abstract

Recent advances in battery and drone technologies have opened up possibilities of commercial use of drones. Private companies are looking into the possibilities of using drones for commercial deliveries from the legal, technical, and economical perspective. Nevertheless, the battery management perspective of such businesses has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we identify that battery management of such application has a major impact of the costs, and formulate an optimization problem to reduce the aging of batteries. We identify two sub-problems, battery assignment, and battery scheduling to derive a solution that minimizes the aging of the batteries. We show that the formulation enables leveraging the trade-off relationships between the packet waiting time and battery purchasing cost. The experimental results show the proposed method reduce the electricity and battery purchasing cost by 25%, and average packet waiting time by more than 50%.