Persistent Monitoring for Points of Interests with Different Priorities Using Multiple UAVs

In this paper, we study the deployment of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to continuously monitor Points of Interests (PoIs) during an extended period, where there are multiple monitoring rounds during the period. Unlike most existing studies simply dispatched UAVs to visit all PoIs in each monitoring round such to minimize the monitoring latencies of PoIs, we observe that different PoIs own different monitoring priorities which should be taken into account while minimizing the monitoring latencies of PoIs. By existing algorithms, it is possible that each PoI is visited the same number of times during the given period and the monitoring latency of a high-priority PoI is the same as that of a lowpriority PoI. In this paper, we formulate a novel weighted monitoring latency minimization problem to repeatedly collect the data of PoIs using the UAVs, by finding a series of schedulings for UAVs during the given period, such that the maximum weighted monitoring latency of PoIs is minimized, where the monitoring latency of a PoI is equal to the time between two consecutive data receptions from the PoI. As the weighted monitoring latency minimization problem is NP-hard, we propose a heuristic algorithm to deal with the problem and construct a series of schedulings for UAVs. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm through experimental simulations. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is very promising.