Drone delivery from trucks: Drone scheduling for given truck routes

Abstract

Last mile deliveries with unmanned aerial vehicles (also denoted as drones) are seen as one promising idea to reduce excessive road traffic. To overcome the difficulties caused by the comparatively short operating ranges of drones, an innovative concept suggests to apply trucks as mobile landing and take‐off platforms. In this context, the paper on hand schedules the delivery to customers by drones for given truck routes. Given a fixed sequence of stops constituting a truck route and a set of customers to be supplied, we aim at a drone schedule (i.e., a set of trips each defining a drone's take‐off and landing stop and the customer serviced), such that all customers are supplied and the total duration of the delivery tour is minimized. We differentiate whether multiple drones or just a single one are placed on a truck and whether or not take‐off and landing stops have to be identical. We provide an analysis of computational complexity for each resulting subproblem, introduce efficient mixed‐integer programs, and compare all cases with regard to their potential of reducing the delivery effort on the last mile.

Drone-assisted deliveries: new formulations for the flying sidekick traveling salesman problem

“…The TSP part is solved with a genetic algorithm. Boysen et al [23] consider a fixed truck route where the truck represents a loading platform for the drones. The truck and the drone can wait each other.…”

The Multiple Flying Sidekicks Traveling Salesman Problem: Parcel Delivery with Multiple Drones

“…Results by Campbell et al (2017) suggest that substantial cost savings can be achieved using the combined truck-drone delivery system with multiple drones per truck, and highlight the benefits associated with automated loading and reduced delivery service times. Boysen et al (2018) study the complexity of problems involving a given set of UAV customers and a fixed truck route.…”

Scheduling of a Parcel Delivery System Consisting of an Aerial Drone Interacting with Public Transportation Vehicles

“…Heuristic algorithms are also provided to address the problem. The paper [18] also considers the same scenario, while it assumes the route of the truck is fixed and discusses how to schedule multiple drones. The authors of [19] formulate the Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones problem (VRPD) as a mixed integer programming model and propose a branch-and-price algorithm to address it.…”

“…Meanwhile, the truck can service some other customers. Some variants of this model have also been published, such as clustering TSP [12], TSP with drone (TSP-D) [13], minimum cost TSP [14], TSP with Drone Station (TSP-DS) [15], Heterogeneous Delivery Problem (HDP) [16,17], Drone Scheduling Problem (DSP) [18], and Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones (VRPD) [19].…”