Brief communication: Vehicle routing problem and UAV application in the post-earthquake scenario

In this paper we simulate unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) recognition after a possible case of diffuse damage after a seismic event in the town of Acireale (Sicily, Italy).Given a set of sites (84 relevant buildings) and the range of the UAV, we are able to find a number of vehicles to employ and the shortest survey path. The problem of finding theshortest survey path is an operational research problem called the vehicle routing problem (VRP). which has a solution that is known to be computationally time-consuming. We used the simulated annealing (SA) heuristic, which is able to provide stable solutions in a relatively short computing time.We also examined the distribution of the cost of the solutions varying the depot on a regular grid in order to find the best area for executing the survey.