A Two-Echelon Cooperated Routing Problem for a Ground Vehicle and Its Carried Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

In this paper, a two-echelon cooperated routing problem for the ground vehicle (GV) and its carried unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is investigated, where the GV travels on the road network and its UAV travels in areas beyond the road to visit a number of targets unreached by the GV. In contrast to the classical two-echelon routing problem, the UAV has to launch and land on the GV frequently to change or charge its battery while the GV is moving on the road network. A new 0–1 integer programming model is developed to formulate the problem, where the constraints on the spatial and temporal cooperation of GV and UAV routes are included. Two heuristics are proposed to solve the model: the first heuristic (H1) constructs a complete tour for all targets and splits it by GV routes, while the second heuristic (H2) constructs the GV tour and assigns UAV flights to it. Random instances with six different sizes (25–200 targets, 12–80 rendezvous nodes) are used to test the algorithms. Computational results show that H1 performs slightly better than H2, while H2 uses less time and is more stable.

The adoption of self-driving delivery robots in last mile logistics

“…Later, more practical constraints were incorporated, such as payload-dependent flight and duration and restricted flying areas ( Jeong et al, 2019 ). In another study, Luo et al (2017) investigated a cooperated routing problem for the ground vehicle with UAVs, which extended the routing problem of the UAV and vehicle tandem to multiple vehicle situations. Wang and Sheu (2019) extended the studied routing problem to more generic scenarios, including multiple UAVs with parallel flying and landing at known stations.…”

The The Application of Drones in City Logistics Concepts

“…In this variant, the final phase of the delivery is executed exclusively by drones. A relatively limited number of papers analyzed this variant, and some of them analyzed the variant where a ground vehicle carries multiple drones [33], or the ground vehicle carries only one drone that can serve multiple locations in one flight [34]. In the paper [19], the authors analyze a different variant of cooperation between drones and ground vehicles where the purpose of drones is to resupply the ground vehicles during the delivery.…”

The Programming Model of Air-Ground Cooperative Patrol Between Multi-UAV and Police Car

“…The air-ground cooperative patrol needs to arrange the routes of police vehicles and UAVs, which involves the site selection of UAV launch/recovery points and vehicle path planning. Both of them are NP-hard combination optimization problems, and most problems are solved by heuristic algorithms [44]. Currently, genetic algorithms have been proven to be an effective algorithm for solving combinatorial optimization problems.…”