Data Collection in Advanced Metering Infrastructure Using UAVs

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the collection of data from wireless devices, sensor nodes, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices has recently received significant attention. In this paper, we study the data collection process from a set of smart electric meters enabled by UAVs. Our objective is to minimize the total annual cost of the electric utility by jointly optimizing the number of UAVs, their power source sizing (represented by the UAVs' batteries), the selected starting point of each UAV as well as the data collection trip planning. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is generally difficult to be optimally solved. In order to find a solution, the problem has been decoupled into two sub-problems where a candidate UAV and a number of buildings are first grouped into trips via genetic algorithms (GA), and then the optimum trip path is found using a travelling salesman problem (TSP) branch and bound algorithm in the second.