Hybrid Truck-drone Delivery System with Pickup and Delivery Operations

Rashid, Reza; Teimoury, Ebrahim

doi:10.22034/ijiems.2023.403462.1063

Hybrid Truck-drone Delivery System with Pickup and Delivery Operations

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Reza Rashid

Ebrahim Teimoury

Iran university of science and technology

10.22034/ijiems.2023.403462.1063

Abstract

In recent past years, drone delivery services gained tremendous attention from academia and logistic service providers, but it has some restrictions. For example, they have limited battery and payload capacities which reduce the efficiency of the delivery system. For that matter, coordination of ground vehicles and drones is proposed to take advantage of both trucks’ large capacity and the drone’s high speed, where the truck is used as a mobile depot and the drone is used to deliver parcels to customers. On the other hand, Due to the increase in e-commerce popularity, customers’ expectations for door-to-door services are increased. For this reason, we focused on the pickup and delivery problem in a truck and drone delivery system and proposed a mathematical model which aims to minimize the completion time. This work processes with a Branch-and-Bound and a heuristic Branch-and-Bound. To evaluate the performance of the proposed solution methods, numerous computational experiments are conducted, where the results show the efficiency of the proposed solution methods.

Keywords

Last mile delivery

paired pickup and delivery

truck and drone routing

heuristic

Branch-and-Bound

mobile depot routing