A UAV mobile edge computing (MEC) fleet trades energy against delay, and its schedules form a Pareto front; we call a scheduler operable when the fleet can be asked for any point on that front at run time. We propose PrefDT, to the best of our knowledge the first preference-conditioned Decision Transformer for the problem of joint trajectory, association and offloading scheduling. Its idea comes from language modeling: we hand the model the desired trade-off as an input, such that a single model only needs to be trained once offline to return any desired point on the curve in one rollout. The fleet's state is summarized by attention pooling with a per-user bypass, so the scheduler keeps working when user reports are lost. The energy target is a running budget decremented by what the fleet actually spends. As a result, when wind or load pushes consumption off the plan, the policy can track the difference and hold its budget. Because no corpus of preference-labeled flights exists, we design a distillation pipeline and build the corpus by ourselves. In simulation against 26 method variants, PrefDT produces the best trade-off curve of any learned method and holds its energy budget to within 0.6% when propulsion cost rises by half in mid-flight.
In cloud manufacturing, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can support both product collection and mobile edge computing (MEC). This joint operation forms a hybrid scheduling problem, where physical logistics decisions are coupled with computational task scheduling. In this paper, UAVs collect finished products from manufacturing stations and transport them back to a central depot. Meanwhile, computational tasks generated by industrial sensor devices at these stations are processed locally, at UAVs, or offloaded via UAVs to the cloud. This coupling makes the problem challenging. A UAV can provide MEC services only during its service window at a station, so routing decisions directly determine when UAV-assisted offloading is available. Routing decisions also affect the UAV energy budget and the availability of onboard computing and communication resources for computational task execution under task deadline constraints. To address this, we propose an agentic-AI-assisted optimization framework with two components. First, we develop an agentic AI that combines large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and chain-of-thought reasoning to translate user input into an interpretable mathematical formulation for the hybrid scheduling problem. Second, we design a hierarchical deep reinforcement learning approach based on proximal policy optimization (PPO), where the upper layer learns UAV routing and the lower layer optimizes per-slot task execution and resource allocation. Simulation results show that the proposed framework yields more consistent formulations, while the hierarchical PPO achieves full product collection in 99.6% of the last 500 episodes and maintains a 100% deadline satisfaction rate, with more stable performance than the advantage actor-critic approach.
In multi-robot missions such as post-disaster search and rescue, a short communication range fragments a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into transient information islands. Under such intermittent connectivity, the prevailing "allocate-then-execute" paradigm--which requires global consensus before any physical movement--breaks down. This paper proposes the Communication-Constrained Online Performance Impact (CC-OPI) algorithm, an event-driven method that interleaves task negotiation with physical execution. CC-OPI replans only at discrete physical and topological events and integrates two further elements. The first is a pair of cost-evaluation metrics adapted to dynamic topologies--one with a spatial locality penalty that promotes regionalized operation, the other with a deadline-aware urgency term--complemented by a non-preemptive state lock that shields each UAV's ongoing action. The second is a decentralized fault-tolerance layer that pairs version-based state synchronization with a global-time-driven emergency pool. We establish that CC-OPI terminates in finite time, free of stale-completion deadlock and of unbounded reassignment within the mission horizon. In simulations at a 250 m communication radius, CC-OPI sustains a task completion rate of about 0.80: it leads a matched online execution of the unmodified Performance Impact (PI) and Consensus-Based Bundle Algorithm (CBBA) rules by about seven percentage points, exceeds the naively transferred static baselines by roughly 20 points, and remains within several points of PI and CBBA under full connectivity. Within the tested settings, CC-OPI degrades gracefully as connectivity weakens and absorbs packet loss, terrain occlusion, and runtime task arrival. The price is more messages and some redundant travel--a deliberate trade-off of efficiency for robustness.
The growing deployment of delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) has made store-carry-forward (SCF) communication indispensable under sparse connectivity. However, intermittent contacts, finite buffers, and limited message time-to-live (TTL) often give rise to sparse delivery and congestion, leading to substantial end-to-end performance degradation. To address this challenge, this study explores the joint optimization of decentralized opportunistic routing and controllable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight, aiming to enlarge future contacts through discrete UAV headings while enabling per-node replication under contact-limited observations. Building upon this architecture, we study cooperative factored routing--UAV control under centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) and propose JUROR (Joint UAV flight and Opportunistic Routing, based on the proximal policy optimization (PPO) framework. In our design, we first cast the problem as a factored partially observable Markov decision process with sequential motion--routing coupling and a per-step team reward; subsequently, decentralized actors act on local observations while a training-time critic uses global statistics, and an optional multi-horizon hotspot predictor provides auxiliary supervision. Simulation results over four traffic modes demonstrate effective gains over PRoPHET and MaxProp, while retaining contact-limited decentralized execution.