On the Flexible Demand Assignment Problems: Case of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Multiresource generalized assignment problem (MRGAP) has enormous applications in solving real problems of industries. In recent years, several generalizations of MRGAP have been proposed to tackle very difficult problems. An important generalization is called flexible demand assignment (FDA) problem. In this paper, a generalization of FDA is proposed that has many applications. Two features of our formulation are inclusion of: 1) acceptance of orders from a large set of available orders and 2) consideration of setup time between operations of two consecutive of tasks. We show an interesting application of generalized FDA is unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assignment problem. For the UAV assignment problem, we show our formulation considerably reduces the size of the problem compared to some recent results. To test effectiveness of the proposed model, computational experiment with CPLEX for the UAV assignment problem is presented.