Recovery Operations Inc. is a private contracting company that specializes in
logistics solutions in disaster situations such as after earthquakes and floods,
or after nuclear disasters or in active war zones. In order to maintain their
position as one of the most reputable companies in this domain they are
expanding capabilities to include unmanned aerial drones, in conjunction
with their existing fleet of terrain vehicles. Drones have the ability to access
areas that terrain vehicles find time/cost prohibitive, too dangerous or
impossible to access. Additionally, drones can takeoff and land from either
the home warehouse or from a stationary vehicle in the field. Your group is
tasked to determine an effective solution to best utilize drones.
When the company submits a bid for a new contract they must provide an
estimate of total cost, time and other resources to the government or private
institution. While some overhead cost is typically expected, a large under-
estimate in cost is likely to have an adverse impact on the likelihood of being
successful on future contracts. Due to complexities of real world situations it
is desirable to have an accurate procedure for estimating final costs, in
particular to determine the total operating cost of the drones and terrain
vehicles. Your estimates should include variances that reflect real world
operating conditions (e.g., probability of break down, weather, etc.). You will
NOT be given a list of what type of vehicle is to deliver each item, this is a
part of the problem to be solved.
Your group is also tasked to create a web-based interface that allows, for any
contract, the tracking of drones, vehicles and vehicle operators; the cargo
(type, weight, priority, etc.) being shipped; location and delivery
results/attempts/etc., and any other relevant information. This interface must
allow users to upload a map on the morning of each day, along with a text file
containing the number and capacity of available vehicles/drones, coordinates
of warehouse(s), target areas and their cargo request and priority level (i.e., if
the area requires water or first aid kits to be delivered). Of course, high
priority items should be delivered as quickly as possible and it may be that
multiple cargo shipments are to be delivered to an area, and each shipment
may have different priority levels. Given that the company will have only V
vehicles and D drones, your goal is to deliver as many of the cargo items as
possible while minimizing the total cost to do so. Items with higher priority
must be delivered as early as possible on the same day as they are requested.
The problem can be thought of through the following tasks (not in any
particular order):
Heuristic: Your group will create a heuristic algorithm for finding the best set
of delivery paths that it can by scheduling each vehicle and drone. From this
solution you will be able to estimate the total cost of delivering the ordered
goods on a given day. In order to evaluate the quality of your approach it will
be necessary to create several test cases to best reflect different potential
situations that could occur (number of drones and vehicles, drop off locations,
costs, etc.). There will be an infinite set of possible scenarios, your group
should be focused on finding a good set of cases that expose your algorithm
strengths/weaknesses.
Interface: Create a user-friendly interactive web-based experience so that
users have the ability to easily visualize and interact with relevant data. The
interface must also allow for a map and problem-specific data to be uploaded,
then provide your solution to the scheduling problem, with associated
costs/etc.