Reactive Planning-Driven Approach to Online UAVs Mission Rerouting and Rescheduling

The presented problem concerns the route planning of a UAV fleet carrying out deliveries to spatially dispersed customers in a highly dynamic and unpredictable environment within a specified timeframe. The developed model allows for predictive (i.e., taking into account forecasted changing weather conditions) and reactive (i.e., enabling contingency UAVs rerouting) delivery mission planning (i.e., NP-hard problem) in terms of the constraint satisfaction problem. Due to the need to implement an emergency return of the UAV to the base or handling ad hoc ordered deliveries, sufficient conditions have been developed. Checking that these conditions are met allows cases to be eliminated if they do not guarantee acceptable solutions, thereby allowing the calculations to be sped up. The experiments carried out showed the usefulness of the proposed approach in DSS-based contingency planning of the UAVs’ mission performed in a dynamic environment.

Publicly-led proactive and privately-led reactive planning : a comparison of comprehensive planning and development approaches between East Bayfront and King-Liberty Village

This research examines two sites in downtown Toronto undergoing large-scale comprehensive brownfield redevelopment schemes. While city agencies helped to spur initial investment in King-Liberty Village, most changes have been privately-led while the planning department has attempted to incrementally guide development and the inclusion of specific public amenities. Waterfront Toronto's planning of East-Bayfront is seen as a strategic public investment and has undergone proactive policy-led planning. These differing frameworks have resulted in contrasting outcomes. While the planning and development framework of the latter has created the conditions for a neighbourhood well-serviced by transit and more robust parkland, affordable housing and sustainability goals, it has required enormous public investment. The process in King-Liberty Village is more indicative of the challenges facing other private redevelopments that often require greater public planning resources than are available to ensure Toronto's continued growth is sufficiently accommodated.

Publicly-led proactive and privately-led reactive planning : a comparison of comprehensive planning and development approaches between East Bayfront and King-Liberty Village

This research examines two sites in downtown Toronto undergoing large-scale comprehensive brownfield redevelopment schemes. While city agencies helped to spur initial investment in King-Liberty Village, most changes have been privately-led while the planning department has attempted to incrementally guide development and the inclusion of specific public amenities. Waterfront Toronto's planning of East-Bayfront is seen as a strategic public investment and has undergone proactive policy-led planning. These differing frameworks have resulted in contrasting outcomes. While the planning and development framework of the latter has created the conditions for a neighbourhood well-serviced by transit and more robust parkland, affordable housing and sustainability goals, it has required enormous public investment. The process in King-Liberty Village is more indicative of the challenges facing other private redevelopments that often require greater public planning resources than are available to ensure Toronto's continued growth is sufficiently accommodated.

Reactive UAV Fleet’s Mission Planning in Highly Dynamic and Unpredictable Environments

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) create an interesting alternative for establishing more sustainable urban freight deliveries. The substitution of traditional trucks in the last-mile distribution by a UAV fleet can contribute to urban sustainability by reducing air pollution and increasing urban freight efficiency. This paper presents a novel approach to the joint proactive and reactive planning of deliveries by a UAV fleet. We develop a receding horizon-based approach to reactive, online planning for the UAV fleet’s mission. We considered the delivery of goods to spatially dispersed customers over an assumed time horizon. Forecasted weather changes affect the energy consumption of UAVs and limit their range. Therefore, consideration should be given to plans for follow-up tasks, previously unmet needs, and predictions of disturbances over a moving time horizon. We propose a set of reaction rules that can be encountered during delivery in a highly dynamic and unpredictable environment. We implement a constraint programming paradigm, which is well suited to cope with the nonlinearity of the system’s characteristics. The proposed approach to online reactive UAV routing is evaluated in several instances. The computational experiments have shown that the developed model is capable of providing feasible plans for a UAV fleet’s mission that are robust to changes in weather and customer’s orders.

Trajectory planning for unmanned surface vehicles operating under wave-induced motion uncertainty in dynamic environments

We present a deliberative trajectory planning method to avoid collisions with traffic vessels. It also plans traversal across wavefields generated by these vessels and minimizes the risk of failure. Our method searches over a state-space consisting of pose and time. And, it produces collision-free and minimum-risk trajectory. It uses a lookup table to account for motion uncertainty and failure risk. We also present speed-up techniques to increase performance. Our wave-aware planner produces plans that (1) have shorter execution times and safer when compared to previously developed reactive planning schemes and (2) comply with user-defined wave-traversal constraints and Collision Regulations (COLREGs)