Optimized eVTOL Aircraft Scheduling - An Answer Set Programming Based Approach
Anh-Duong Nguyen, Loc Pham, Nathan Lindsay, Liang Quan Sun, Tran Cao Son · 2024
The emergence of electric vertical-take-off-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft as a potential and robust transportation means brings a lot of excitement and several challenges. Among the challenges is the eVTOLs scheduling problem that is concerned with identifying the routes for available eVTOLs to service a set of requests such that the schedule satisfies certain optimization criteria. eVTOLs scheduling problems could be solved using heuristic search methods developed for computing solutions of drone scheduling for the delivery of goods. This paper presents an implementation of an answer set programming-based approach to solving eVOTLs scheduling problems. The new system differs from earlier systems for drone scheduling problems in its use of a declarative programming paradigm, called answer set programming, to represent the problem and compute solutions. The paper includes an experimental validation of the system and discusses future directions that may be needed for its deployment.