Critical state analysis of drone fleet in limited space

Abstract

The usage of unmanned aerial vehicles like drones is nowadays an important aspect in a number of different areas such as terrain mapping, crop spraying, transportation of packages etc. One such application is intralogistics in warehouses and factories. In those situations, drones are used for automatic transportation of goods. The main aim of this paper is to present method for analysis of critical state of drone fleet in limited space. From reliability point of view, such system can be represented as a multi-state non-coherent system. Proposed method is based on time-independent structure function and uses generalized methods for analysis of multi-state systems, specifically logic differential calculus. This method allows us to analyze a drone fleet, and to identify the best amount of drones in fleet with regard to the efficiency of transport in a limited space. This will be demonstrated on selected drone fleet in case study of this paper.