Emission Monitoring Dispatching of Drones Under Vessel Speed Fluctuation

How to effectively organize drones to monitor pollutants from vessels is an important operational problem in port management. It is defined as the drone scheduling problem (DSP). The effectiveness of precise algorithms and heuristic algorithms in solving DSP has been reported in previous studies. In previous studies, the speed of the vessel was assumed to be constant. However, since the influence of sea waves and vessel power, such an assumption is difficult to satisfy in actual scenarios. The actual position of the vessel may deviate from the position information obtained through prior calculations. As the cumulative position deviation increases, it is possible to make the original feasible monitoring scheme infeasible. It is necessary to consider the emission monitoring dispatching of drones under vessel speed fluctuation in actual monitoring activities of the vessel. To deal with the problem, a dynamic dispatching strategy based on reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed. Considering the vessel speed fluctuation, the monitoring window is divided into multiple sub-time windows. The route information of the vessel in each sub-time window is updated according to the vessel speed fluctuations to reduce the accumulation of deviations between the prior position and the actual position. Then, a lightweight RL strategy is adopted to quickly (re)organize the monitoring scheme in each sub-time window. Numerical experiments illustrate the above division-conquer approach could effectively reduce the possibility of drone monitoring failure caused by vessel speed fluctuations. Also, the superiority of the RL-based dispatching strategy is illustrated by comparing it with multiple dispatching schemes.