GIS-Based Multi-Stop UAV Routing for Emergency Medical Delivery in Khartoum, Sudan: Priority-Aware Optimisation and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Routing a medical-delivery UAV to multiple hospitals must jointly account for distance, flight time, payload, and clinical priority. We present a reproducible GIS-based framework for multi-stop UAV emergency medical routing in Khartoum State, Sudan, using a common obstacle-aware 3-D leg model with grid-based A* routing around no-fly zones and payload-dependent climb, cruise, and descent. We show that a linear priority term in a composite tour cost is order-invariant and cannot distinguish visiting sequences. We therefore use a priority-weighted completion-time objective with hard deadlines for Critical hospitals, with criterion weights derived from health professionals using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. On a 14-hospital network, exact Held–Karp and label-setting dynamic programming provide proven optima for benchmarking classical, metaheuristic, and Advantage Actor–Critic sequencing methods (A2C-SP). The revised objective reduces optimal priority-weighted completion time by 14% with only a 0.2% increase in distance. A2C-SP is 14.7% above the optimum across 47 unseen instances while generating routes in approximately 2 ms. Without retraining, it also plans capacity- and range-feasible multi-sortie missions on a 59-hospital city network, achieving a priority-weighted completion time of 110 min versus 137 min for the published toolbox route. At city scale, a single UAV cannot serve more than 5 of 16 Critical hospitals within 15 min, highlighting fleet sizing as a key constraint for meeting such deadlines.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2026 · DOI ↗