This study explores a new research direction on the cooperation between electric vehicles (EVs) and drones in last-mile logistics in the form of electric vehicle routing problem with drones (E-VRPD). The primary objective of E-VRPD is to find an optimal vehicle tour to minimize the total completion time to deliver parcels to a set of customer nodes using a set of EVs, each equipped with a single drone. Due to the importance of such problems and the lack of existing techniques, in this work, we develop a sequential decomposition algorithm with an improvement phase to solve E-VRPD. This algorithm involves the development of a mathematical formulation for inserting drone sorties into an EV tour, leading to a matheuristic algorithm. The proposed method is evaluated on a set of instances involving up to 40 customers and 7 recharging nodes, with the experimental results showing the effectiveness and relevancy of E-VRPD.
Vehicle Routing Problem for an Integrated Electric Vehicles and Drones System
Lect.Notes Social.Inform.
International Conference on Intelligent Transport Systems ; 2022 ; Lisbon, Portugal December 15, 2022 - December 16, 2022
2023-04-28
18 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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