  Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are aircraft whose flights can be fully
autonomous without any provision for human intervention. One of the most useful
and promising domains where UAVs can be employed is natural disaster
management.
  In this paper, we focus on an emergency scenario and propose the use of a
fleet of UAVs that help rescue teams to individuate people needing help inside
an affected area. We model this situation as an original graph theoretical
problem called Multi-Depot Multi-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem with Total
Completion Times minimization (MDMT-VRP-TCT); we go through some problems
already studied in the literature that appear somehow similar to it and
highlight the differences, propose a mathematical formulation for our problem
as a MILP, design a matheuristic framework to quickly solve large instances,
and experimentally test its performance. Beyond the proposed application, our
solution works in any case in which a multi-depot multi-trip vehicle routing
problem must be solved.

Optimization and Control;Robotics