DDL: Empowering Delivery Drones With Large-Scale Urban Sensing Capability

Delivery drones provide a promising sensing platform for smart cities thanks to their city-wide infrastructure and large-scale deployment. However, due to limited battery lifetime and available resources, it is challenging to schedule delivery drones to derive both high sensing and delivery performance, which is a highly complicated optimization problem with several coupled decision variables. Meanwhile, this complex optimization problem involves multiple interconnected decision variables, making it even more complex. In this paper, we first propose a delivery drone-based sensing system and formulate a mixed-integer non-linear programming problem (MINLP) that jointly optimizes the sensing utility and delivery time, considering practical factors including energy capacity and available delivery drones. Then we provide an efficient solution that integrates the strength of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and heuristic, which decouples the highly complicated optimization search process and replaces the heavy computation with a rapid approximation. Evaluation results compared with the state-of-the-art baselines show that DDL improves the scheduling quality by at least 46% on average. More importantly, our proposed method could effectively improve the computational efficiency, which is up to 98 times higher than the best baseline.