The energy limitation remains one of the biggest constraints in drone path planning, since it prevents drones from performing long surveillance missions. To assist drones in such missions, recharging stations have recently been introduced. They are platforms where the drone can autonomously land to recharge its battery before continuing the mission. However, the cost of those platforms remains a significant obstacle to their adoption. Consequently, it is important to reduce their number while planning the path of the drone. This work introduces the Single Drone Multiple Recharging Stations on Large Farm problem (SD-MRS-LF). A large farm is considered as an area of interest to cover with a set of candidate locations where recharging stations can be installed. The aim is to determine the path of the drone that minimizes the number of locations for recharging stations as well as the completion time of the surveillance mission. This path planning problem falls within the realm of computational geometry and is related to similar problems that are encountered in the field of robotics. The problem is complicated due to environmental constraints on farms such as wind speed and direction, which produce asymmetries in the optimal solution. A back-and-forth-k-opt simulated annealing (BFKSA) approach is proposed to solve the defined problem. The new approach is compared to the basic back-and-forth (BF) and a K-opt variant of the well-known simulated annealing (KSA) approach over a set of 20 random topologies in different environmental conditions. The results from computational experiments show that the BFKSA approach outperforms the others, in terms of providing feasible solutions and minimizing the number of recharges.

The growing deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in energy-constrained applications has highlighted the need for appropriate energy consumption models. However, selecting between physics-based (white-box) and data-driven (black-box) modeling paradigms remains a largely implicit process. Researchers often navigate undocumented trade-offs among required predictive accuracy, empirical data availability, and access to aerodynamic testing infrastructure without a formalized structure. This study proposes a two-stage decision-making framework to formalize UAV energy model selection. In the first stage, a qualitative decision tree is inductively derived from a corpus of 23 recent studies, explicitly mapping infrastructural and informational constraints to five distinct modeling regimes. In the second stage, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is applied to quantitatively evaluate the feasible alternatives based on context-specific criteria: accuracy, interpretability, development cost, and customization adaptability. The structural logic of the framework is evaluated against an independent set of 24 holdout studies, demonstrating a high degree of consistency between the framework’s recommendations and the methodologies employed in the literature. Furthermore, the quantitative AHP scoring introduces “fallback flexibility,” enabling researchers to mathematically identify alternative modeling strategies when primary experimental conditions are compromised. Supported by an open-source Python graphical interface, this framework aims to reduce methodological ambiguity and support more structured, reproducible model selection in UAV energy research.

The rapid proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in energy-intensive applications (such as autonomous logistics, continuous surveillance, and mobile edge computing) has driven a critical need for highly reliable energy consumption models. However, selecting an appropriate modeling strategy remains an ad-hoc process; researchers must frequently navigate complex, undocumented trade-offs among required predictive accuracy, empirical data availability, and access to aerodynamic testing infrastructure. This study proposes a systematic, two-stage decision-making framework designed to standardize UAV energy model selection. In the first stage, a qualitative decision tree is inductively derived from a comprehensive corpus of recent literature (an 80% training split), explicitly mapping infrastructural and informational constraints to five distinct modeling regimes, ranging from novel white-box derivations to deep-learning black-box applications. This structural logic is subsequently validated against an independent 20% literature holdout set, achieving a 100% predictive match. In the second stage, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is applied to quantitatively rank the feasible alternatives based on context-specific criteria: accuracy, interpretability, development cost, and customization adaptability. Crucially, this quantitative scoring introduces "fallback flexibility," allowing researchers to seamlessly pivot to mathematically adjacent alternative models when unforeseen experimental roadblocks occur. Embedded within an open-source Python graphical interface, this framework mitigates methodological ambiguity, prevents the over-allocation of research resources, and fosters greater reproducibility within the energy-aware UAV research community.