Construction and Maintenance of Swarm Drones

TL;DR

This paper introduces a data structure for efficiently maintaining an approximate solution to a dynamic drone coverage problem, maximizing coverage of weighted points with insertions and deletions in logarithmic time.

Contribution

It proposes a novel data structure that maintains a constant-factor approximation for the dynamic drone coverage problem with efficient update operations.

Findings

Supports insertions and deletions in O(log n) time

Provides a constant-factor approximation for coverage maximization

Efficiently handles dynamic changes in drone coverage scenarios

Abstract

In this paper we study the dynamic version of the covering problem motivated by the coverage of drones' swarm: Let $S$ be a set of $n$ non-negative weighted points in the plane representing users. Also, consider a set $P$ of $m$ disks that correspond to the covering radius of each drone. We want to place (and maintain) set $P$ such that the sum of the weights of the points in $S$ covered by disks from $P$ is maximized. We present a data structure that maintains a small constant factor approximate solution efficiently, under insertions and deletions of points to/from $S$ where each update operation can be performed $O(\log n)$ time.