A Method of Optimized Deployment of Charging Stations for Drone Delivery

Drones have become a new means for parcel delivery in recent years. As the flight distances of currently available commercial drones are usually limited due to the battery capacity constraint, this article considers the placement of charging stations to charge or replace the battery, and thus enlarge the coverage of customers. The problem of deploying a number of charging stations to cover the customers in a demand area is investigated. A computationally efficient deployment approach is proposed. It first deploys charging stations in a triangle pattern, which fully covers the demand area. Accounting the locations of customers in the area, we then use an adjustment procedure to recursively remove some charging stations that cover no or fewer customers and reposition the remaining charging stations. Computer simulations are conducted, and comparisons with an existing relevant method are demonstrated to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.