  The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic invoked scientists and researchers to
prepare the world for future disasters. During the pandemic, global authorities
on healthcare urged the importance of disinfection of objects and surfaces. To
implement efficient and safe disinfection services during the pandemic, robots
have been utilized for indoor assets. In this paper, we envision the use of
drones for disinfection of outdoor assets in hospitals and other facilities.
Such heterogeneous assets may have different service demands (e.g., service
time, quantity of the disinfectant material etc.), whereas drones have
typically limited capacity (i.e., travel time, disinfectant carrying capacity).
To serve all the facility assets in an efficient manner, the drone to assets
allocation and drone travel routes must be optimized. In this paper, we
formulate the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) to find optimal route
for each drone such that the total service time is minimized, while
simultaneously the drones meet the demands of each asset allocated to it. The
problem is solved using mixed integer programming (MIP). As CVRP is an NP-hard
problem, we propose a lightweight heuristic to achieve sub-optimal performance
while reducing the time complexity in solving the problem involving a large
number of assets.
