Provider-centric Allocation of Drone Swarm Services

Abstract: We propose a novel framework for the allocation of drone swarms for delivery services known as Swarm-based Drone-as-a-Service (SDaaS). The allocation framework ensures minimum cost (aka maximum profit) to drone swarm providers while meeting the time requirement of service consumers. The constraints in the delivery environment (e.g., limited recharging pads) are taken into consideration. We propose three algorithms to select the best allocation of drone swarms given a set of requests from multiple consumers. We conduct a set of experiments to evaluate and compare the efficiency of these algorithms considering the provider's profit, feasibility, requests fulfilment, and drones utilization level.