A Joint LLM and Optimization Agent Solution for Drone Scheduling in Victim Search Missions

Victim search in wilderness areas is time-critical. Drones enable rapid area search, but scheduling them is challenging because victims may continue moving, detection results are uncertain, and effective decisions must combine structured mission information with unstructured contextual clues and domain knowledge. To address this, we propose an agent-aided drone scheduling system. The system employs an agent at the ground control station (GCS) to coordinate multiple drones over successive search cycles. In each cycle, the agent applies a scheduling policy that combines a large language model (LLM) for reasoning about where to search with an optimizer for determining how to dispatch the drones under energy constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed system consistently completes the victim-search mission, whereas none of the six non-LLM baselines does so and direct LLM scheduling is considerably less reliable. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/1643204431/llm-uav-victim-search.