In recent years, there has been an increased demand in the use of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in indoor environments such as material handling task in a manufacturing environment and plant/environment monitoring task in a greenhouse. However, there is a lack of work reported on this topic. This paper presents a detailed study on several UAV systems and UAV scheduling systems. It is followed by a proposed system of UAV application in indoor environment, which comprises components of UAV system addressed in detail; focused on scheduler as the heart of operations. Consequently, system architecture of UAV scheduling system is presented and the framework of scheduler component is included. Scheduler component works in a phased manner to provide a systematic abstraction and achieve an efficient computation time. This study serves as a reference guide for UAV application in indoor environment.

This paper formulates an integrated framework for deciding about the green supplier selection criteria in food supply chain and also proposes different methods that account for single and multiple sourcing of supplier selection. Green supplier selection relies on green criteria, so determination of suitable set of criteria will affect decision-maker results directly. In this research, an operational model including combination of general and environmental criteria is introduced for green supplier selection criteria in raw material and packaging of food industry. This model reviewed a literature on general and environmental criteria that help us to know and make a set of common green criteria. Afterward, weighting criteria and collecting of sub-criteria are done by an expert team using the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Delphi method. The expert team tried to propose important and practical sub-criteria which are well fitted to food industry. Finally, in the section of supplier selection, two kinds of qualitative and quantitative data are discussed when single and multiple sourcing are required, respectively. Fuzzy Grey Relational Analysis is proposed to ranking suppliers in presence of qualitative and imprecise data. Also linear programming is used to present a model which can select the best suppliers and allocate the orders among them optimally.

The application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in indoor environment is emerging nowadays due to the advancements in technology. UAV brings more space flexibility in an occupied or hardly accessible indoor environment, e.g. shop floor of manufacturing industry, greenhouse, and nuclear powerplant. UAV helps in creating an autonomous manufacturing system by executing tasks with less human intervention in a time-efficient manner. Consequently, a scheduler is an essential component to be focused on; yet the number of reported studies on UAV scheduling has been minimal. This work proposes a mathematical model of the problem and a heuristic-based methodology to solve it. To suit near real-time operations, a quick response towards uncertain events and a quick creation of new high-quality feasible schedule are needed. Hence, the proposed heuristic is incorporated with particle swarm optimization algorithm to find a near optimal schedule in a short computation time. This proposed methodology is implemented into a scheduler and tested on a few scales of datasets generated based on real flight demonstrations. Performance evaluation of scheduler is discussed in detail, and the best solution obtained from a selected set of parameters is reported.