Drones-aided Asset Maintenance in Hospitals

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of drones for outdoor asset disinfection in hospitals, formulating and solving a capacitated vehicle routing problem to optimize drone routes and service efficiency during pandemics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of drone routing optimization for outdoor disinfection in healthcare facilities, including a heuristic solution for large-scale problems.

Findings

Optimized drone routes reduce total service time.

Heuristic method achieves near-optimal solutions faster.

Effective allocation of drones to assets improves disinfection efficiency.

Abstract

The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic invoked scientists and researchers to prepare the world for future disasters. During the pandemic, global authorities on healthcare urged the importance of disinfection of objects and surfaces. To implement efficient and safe disinfection services during the pandemic, robots have been utilized for indoor assets. In this paper, we envision the use of drones for disinfection of outdoor assets in hospitals and other facilities. Such heterogeneous assets may have different service demands (e.g., service time, quantity of the disinfectant material etc.), whereas drones have typically limited capacity (i.e., travel time, disinfectant carrying capacity). To serve all the facility assets in an efficient manner, the drone to assets allocation and drone travel routes must be optimized. In this paper, we formulate the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) to find optimal route for each drone such that the total service time is minimized, while simultaneously the drones meet the demands of each asset allocated to it. The problem is solved using mixed integer programming (MIP). As CVRP is an NP-hard problem, we propose a lightweight heuristic to achieve sub-optimal performance while reducing the time complexity in solving the problem involving a large number of assets.