Matheuristic algorithms for the parallel drone scheduling traveling salesman problem

Abstract

In a near future drones are likely to become a viable way of distributing parcels in a urban environment. In this paper we consider the parallel drone scheduling traveling salesman problem, where a set of customers requiring a delivery is split between a truck and a fleet of drones, with the aim of minimizing the total time required to service all the customers.We present a set of matheuristic methods for the problem. The new approaches are validated via an experimental campaign on two sets of benchmarks available in the literature. It is shown that the approaches we propose perform very well on small/medium size instances. Solving a mixed integer linear programming model to optimality leads to the first optimality proof for all the instances with 20 customers considered, while the heuristics are shown to be fast and effective on the same dataset. When considering larger instances with 48 to 229 customers, the results are competitive with stateof-the-art methods and lead to 28 new best known solutions out of the 90 instances considered.

The The Application of Drones in City Logistics Concepts

“…[38,39]). the locations that are out of the drone flight range, or the amount of goods exceeds the carrying capacity of a drone [36,37]. Kim and Moon [38] analyzed the variant where the ground vehicles distribute the goods to city terminals that are located close to the customers, from where the delivery is executed by drones.…”

Commanding Cooperative UGV-UAV With Nested Vehicle Routing for Emergency Resource Delivery

“…In addition, such nested vehicle routing planning (NVRP) problem has been expanded from the initial one-truck onedrone distribution [10], [20], [30]- [32] to the one-truck multi-drones delivery problem, the one-truck multi-drones delivery and pickup problem [33]- [36], and multiple trucks multiple drones problem [22], [24], [35], [37]. In recent years, several solution methodologies have been proposed to address the conundrum of nested vehicle routing through planning the paths of the UGV and UAVs to enable all customers to get packages, while ensuring that the time and energy consumed are minimized.…”

Recent challenges in Routing and Inventory Routing: E‐commerce and last‐mile delivery

“…The setting is enriched in Dorling et al [50] by considering the effect of battery and payload weight on energy consumption. We refer to Wang and Sheu [107], Kitjacharoenchai et al [62], Karak and Abdelghany [61], Schermer et al [93], Sacramento et al [89], Agatz et al [2], Dell'Amico et al [47,48], Poikonen et al [81], and Poikonen and Golden [80] for the most recent studies on the VRPD. Ulmer and Thomas [99] study a problem where drones are used for same‐day delivery services.…”