Combining parallel computing and biased randomization for solving the team orienteering problem in real-time

In smart cities, unmanned aerial vehicles and self-driving vehicles are gaining increased concern. These vehicles might utilize ultra-reliable telecommunication systems, Internet-based technologies, and navigation satellite services to locate their customers and other team vehicles to plan their routes. Furthermore, the team of vehicles should serve their customers by specified due date efficiently. Coordination between the vehicles might be needed to be accomplished in real-time in exceptional cases, such as after a traffic accident or extreme weather conditions. This paper presents the planning of vehicle routes as a team orienteering problem. In addition, an ‘agile’ optimization algorithm is presented to plan these routes for drones and other autonomous vehicles. This algorithm combines an extremely fast biased-randomized heuristic and a parallel computing approach.