Unmanned aerial vehicles/drones in vehicle routing problems: a literature review

Abstract

During recent years, advances in drone technologies have made them applicable in various fields of industry, and their popularity continues to grow. In this paper, the academic contributions on drones routing problems are analyzed between 2005 and 2019 to identify the main characteristics of these types of problems, as well as the research trends and recent improvements. The literature is classified according to the objectives optimized, solution methods, applications, constraints, and whether they use a complementary vehicle or not. Finally, a discussion for trends and future research is presented.

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

“…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. A survey of UGV-UAV cooperation delivery [38] summarizes forty-eight paper, shows the percentage of common methods such as MILP, binary programming (BP), constraint programming (CP),dynamic programming (DP), non-linear programming (NLP), branch-and-bound algorithm (B&B), robust optimization (RO), quadratic programming (QP) and so on.…”

Exploration of a disrupted road network after a disaster with an online routing algorithm

“…Organizations that support disaster response are encouraging the use of UAVs (FSD 2019). The main applications of this technology are to search for victims, fast delivery of medical supplies and to extract ground information by continuously transferring a real-time video of the affected zone (Bravo et al 2019;Rojas Viloria et al 2020). Bravo et al (2019) focus on planning the UAV route to find victims from UAVs' images.…”

“…They conclude that practitioners must deal with government restrictions and limited information on the logistics operations. Farahani et al (2020) and Rojas Viloria et al (2020) present a literature review on vehicle routing problems and the use of UAVs. The authors conclude that in practice, most logistics applications focus on parcel distribution, collecting information or surveillance.…”

“…The authors affirm that most studies focus on minimizing transportation costs. In addition, Farahani et al (2020) and Macrina et al (2020) highlight the lack of contributions regarding uncertain information.…”

“…Despite the growing number of studies in humanitarian logistics, there is a limited number of research addressing response operations after a disaster and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) (Coutinho et al 2018;Oruc and Kara 2018;Farahani et al 2020;Macrina et al 2020;Pamukcu and Balcik 2020;Rojas Viloria et al 2020). Organizations in disaster management, such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT 2019) and WeRobotics (WeRobotics 2019), have been starting to include new technologies (FSD 2019).…”