Smart border patrol using drones and wireless charging system under budget limitation

Harsh environmental factors surrounding the national borders as well as their extensive length make the use of manned systems for monitoring every location on the border a risky, expensive, and hardly possible task. Smart border patrol using small-size drones may provide significant help in patrolling areas inaccessible to patrol agents, reduce agent response time, and increase the safety of patrol agents working in dangerous regions. However, the short flight duration associated with small-size drones due to battery limitation can be a serious drawback for such a system for seamless surveillance. Therefore, this paper proposes a drone-based continuous surveillance system for border patrol with a dynamic wireless battery charging system that is built onto an electrification line (E-line). To control the maximum time interval between two consecutive flights to a particular section of the border, a permitted revisiting gap is assigned to each location on the border based on its criticality. A multi-objective mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model is developed to minimize both the total length of the E-line system for the wireless charging system and the number of drones to satisfy the revisiting gap constraint for a secure border patrol. A solution algorithm is proposed to achieve the Pareto-optimal set. This method provides the decision-maker with a set of candidate solutions to choose from based on their priorities and budgetary constraints. We illustrate our method using a case study on a segment of the US-Mexico borderline.