Highlights Truck-drone delivery problem coded as a sequence. Mathematical modelling of a tandem formed by one truck and one drone. Battery capacity constraints and multiple customers’ visits per flight allowed. Design of a heuristic approach to solve the problem. Performance of the heuristic approach outperforms the exact resolution.

    Abstract Recently there have been significant developments and applications in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In a few years, these applications will be fully integrated into our lives. The practical application and use of UAVs presents several problems that are of a different nature to the specific technology of the components involved. Among them, the most relevant problem deriving from the use of UAVs in logistics distribution tasks is the so-called “last mile” delivery. In the present work, we focus on the resolution of the truck-drone team logistics problem. The problems of tandem routing have a complex structure and have only been partially addressed in the scientific literature. The use of UAVs raises a series of restrictions and considerations that did not appear previously in routing problems; most notably, aspects such as the limited power-life of batteries used by the UAVs and the determination of rendezvous points where they are replaced by fully-charged new batteries. These difficulties have until now limited the mathematical formulation of truck-drone routing problems and their resolution to mainly small-size cases. To overcome these limitations we propose an iterated greedy heuristic based on the iterative process of destruction and reconstruction of solutions. This process is orchestrated by a global optimization scheme using a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. We test our approach in a large set of instances of different sizes taken from literature. The obtained results are quite promising, even for large-size scenarios.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Truck-drone team logistics: A heuristic approach to multi-drop route planning




    Publication date :

    2020-02-29


    Size :

    24 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    Exact and heuristic approaches for the Truck–Drone Team Logistics Problem

    Boccia, Maurizio / Mancuso, Andrea / Masone, Adriano et al. | Elsevier | 2024

    Free access

    Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem in Truck–Drone Team Logistics with Energy Issues

    Ozden-Gurcan, Gokce / Aksit, Beste / Saricicek, Inci | Transportation Research Record | 2024


    ROUTE NETWORK PLANNING FOR DRONE LOGISTICS IN URBAN ENVIRONMENT

    LI LISHUAI / HE FANG / ZHANG LEI et al. | European Patent Office | 2022

    Free access

    Exact and heuristic approaches to Truck–Drone Delivery Problems

    Júlia C. Freitas / Puca Huachi V. Penna / Túlio A.M. Toffolo | DOAJ | 2023

    Free access

    Synchronized Truck and Drone Routing in Package Delivery Logistics

    Das, Dyutimoy Nirupam / Sewani, Rohan / Wang, Junwei et al. | IEEE | 2021