The flying sidekick traveling salesman problem: Optimization of drone-assisted parcel delivery

On the min-cost Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone

“…Recently, an objective function that minimizes the transportation cost was studied by Mathew et al [19] for a related problem called the Heterogeneous Delivery Problem (HDP). However, unlike in [12], [20] and [14], the problem is modelled on a directed physical street network where a truck cannot achieve direct delivery to the customer. Instead, from the endpoint of 95 an arc, the truck can launch a drone that will service the customers.…”

“…The authors use the Nood-Bean Transformation available in Matlab to reduce a GTSP to a TSP, which is then solved by a heuristic proposed in the study. To the best of our knowledge, the min-cost 100 objective function has not been studied for TSP-D when the problem is defined in a more realistic way-similarly to [12], [20], and [14]. Consequently, this gap in the literature provides a strong motivation for studying TSP-D with the min-cost objective function.…”

“…FSTSP proposed in the work of [12]. In FSTSP, the objective is to minimize the delivery completion time, or in other word the time coming back to the depot, of both truck and drone.…”

“…In this paper, we propose a MILP model and two heuristics to solve the min-cost TSP-D: a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) 115 and a heuristic adapted from the work of [12] called TSP-LS. In detail, the contributions of this paper are as follows:…”

“…-We propose a model together with a MILP formulation for the problem 120 which is an extended version of the model proposed in [12] for min-time TSP-D.…”