The 2020 coronavirus pandemic lead to a virtual standstill of air passenger traffic in the spring of that same year. While some travel restrictions have since been lifted, passenger air travel is not expected to return to pre-coronavirus levels for several years. Then the question arises of how to park the large amounts of grounded aircraft efficiently, minimising valuable airport space used. While aircraft parking for this purpose is a largely unexplored area in academic literature, the problem shows similarities with cutting and packing problems which have been researched for many years. Hence, the proposed model in the paper is modelled similar to that of the irregular strip packing model, where a fixed width is used and the length of the parking layout is to be minimised. Aircraft are represented as non-convex polygons and are allowed to rotate in discrete intervals. The concept of the no-fit polygon (NFP) is used in order to prevent overlap between aircraft. A tabu search algorithm with an adaptive tabu list is proposed in order to optimise the sequence and orientations in which the aircraft are placed onto the placement area using a bottom-left (BL) placement strategy. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, several instances are created and tested using computational experiments.

Wild_res have always been a problem; but, with human migration all around the world, this problem has signi_- cantly increased its importance and impact. The mounting challenges facing wild_re management, together with its increasing demand, have necessitated research into technological advancements and methods to increase wild_re management ef_cacy. As Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become more and more widespread, development has skyrocketed and is applied to all kinds of areas, such as surveillance, military, and commercial _lming. Fire surveillance is the area of interest for this project. The main goal of this report is to offer a concise overview of the preliminary design of the _re monitoring swarm system. This report will touch upon the main problems encountered while working on the design and the solutions of these problems. The report ends with some recommendations for the future. Forest _res happen all over Europe; however, the Mediterranean region is most affected by these forest _res. Combined with global warming, the occurrence of forest _res will increase, which will lead to an increase of the annual economic and environmental damage caused by these _res. Both _re _ghters and operational centres have been searching for years to effectively combat forest _res, thereby minimising the damage done by forest _res. Different systems have been used in the past, some as simple as _re lookout towers and some as complex as optical-based smoke detection systems. However, none of these systems has been able to provide real-time data to _re_ghters. This is where this _re monitoring swarm comes into play. The swarm system is composed of a searching and a tracking element. The searching element has 5 Penguin B UAVs and has two operating modes. The _rst mode is detection of _res and con_rming upon detection, while the second mode consists of acting as a mothership for that speci_c _re. The tracking element has 10 Albatross UAVs which can perform three functions, namely high altitude tracking; low altitude tracking; and scouting. Members of the swarm will have a communication system for communication among swarm members and for communication with the operational centres. All UAVs will be launched using a catapult and are capable of a fully autonomous landing...