A Unified Model for Multi-Task Drone Routing in Post-Disaster Road Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a unified neural network model using transformer architecture for multi-task drone routing in post-disaster road assessment, significantly improving efficiency and adaptability over existing methods.

Contribution

The study presents a novel unified model that handles multiple PDRA routing variants with a single neural network, reducing training time and enhancing flexibility through a transformer-based architecture and lightweight adapters.

Findings

Reduces training time and parameters by eight times compared to separate models.

Outperforms single-task DRL, heuristic algorithms, and commercial solvers in solution quality.

Provides rapid, robust solutions for networks up to 1,000 nodes.

Abstract

Post-disaster road assessment (PDRA) is essential for emergency response, enabling rapid evaluation of infrastructure conditions and efficient allocation of resources. Although drones provide a flexible and effective tool for PDRA, routing them in large-scale networks remains challenging. Exact and heuristic optimization methods scale poorly and demand domain expertise, while existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches adopt a single-task paradigm, requiring separate models for each problem variant and lacking adaptability to evolving operational needs. This study proposes a unified model (UM) for drone routing that simultaneously addresses eight PDRA variants. By training a single neural network across multiple problem configurations, UM captures shared structural knowledge while adapting to variant-specific constraints through a modern transformer encoder-decoder architecture. A lightweight adapter mechanism further enables efficient finetuning to unseen attributes without retraining, enhancing deployment flexibility in dynamic disaster scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the UM reduces training time and parameters by a factor of eight compared with training separate models, while consistently outperforming single-task DRL methods by 6-14%, heuristic algorithms by 22-42%, and commercial solvers by 24-82% in terms of solution quality (total collected information value). The model achieves rapid solutions (1-10 seconds) across networks of up to 1,000 nodes, with robustness confirmed through sensitivity analyses. Moreover, finetuning experiments show that unseen attributes can be effectively incorporated with minimal cost while retaining high solution quality. The source code for UM is publicly available at https://github.com/PJ-HTU/UM_PDRA.