Electric scooter (e-scooter) sharing has recently known a wide success in many cities all around the world. Nevertheless, it has also generated issues due to risky and improper behaviour of its users. Wild parking, namely parking without caring about the rules of the road, has in particular become a major issue and has induced an increasing number of cities to impose bans and fines to e-scooter sharing. To tackle wild parking, we introduced the figure of the beautificator, an agent hired by a sharing company with the specific task to reposition e-scooters for guaranteeing urban decorum. In this paper, we propose to increase the effectiveness of the beautificators by integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in their activities: remotely controlled UAVs equipped with cameras are deployed to fly across the sharing service area for identifying e-scooters that require beautification with priority. Thanks to the UAVs, the beautificators do not have to operate blindly, touring locations of parked e-scooters without knowing their parking condition, but can readily learn which e-scooters require their immediate attention. We formulate the problem of optimally scheduling the joint actions of beautificators and UAVs, taking into account beautification constraints, battery limits of UAVs and the possibility of swapping exhausted UAV batteries. For tackling this problem, we propose a mixed integer programming model and a heuristic for accelerating the convergence to the optimum of a state-of-the-art optimization solver, reporting results of computational tests over realistic instances.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Seek & Beautify: integrating UAVs in the optimal beautification of e-scooter sharing fleets




    Publication date :

    2021-06-16


    Size :

    2175523 byte




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    Living fences to protect and beautify

    Morris, W.W. | Engineering Index Backfile | 1939


    How to Beautify Roads With Context Sensitive Design

    British Library Online Contents | 2003


    Optimal Dynamic Coverage Infrastructure for Large-Scale Fleets of Reconnaissance UAVs

    Altshuler, Yaniv / Pentland, Alex / Bruckstein, Alfred M. | Springer Verlag | 2017


    Optimal Dynamic Coverage Infrastructure for Large-Scale Fleets of Reconnaissance UAVs

    Altshuler, Yaniv / Pentland, Alex / Bekhor, Shlomo et al. | ArXiv | 2016

    Free access