Scheduling Drones to Recharge Electric Vehicles.

Drones and Electric Vehicles (EVs) are two technologies that are growing fast and have the potential to revolutionize the transportation sector. In this paper, we take inspiration from a recent patent submitted by Amazon, and we study the problem of scheduling drones that carry a large battery and can partially recharge EVs when a ground charging station is not available. The drones have a limited range, as they are also using an electric motor powered by batteries which need regular recharging. Thus, given a fixed set of drones, the problem that arises is to calculate a schedule for the flying and the recharging of the drones aiming to maximize the number of EVs that are actually serviced. In this vein, we develop a greedy algorithm that uses a heuristic search mechanism. We evaluate our algorithm in a realistic setting and in a plethora of scenarios to verify its effectiveness.