Truck-drone hybrid delivery routing: Payload-energy dependency and No-Fly zones

The truck-drone hybrid delivery system uses a truck as a station for drones in addition to its delivery function and is getting attention because the strengths of these individual vehicles can be selectively and synergistically exploited. In this study, we extended the previous vehicle routing models to the hybrid delivery systems by taking into account two important practical issues: the effect of parcel weight on drone energy consumption and restricted flying areas. The flight range of the drones is heavily susceptible to the loaded weight due to the limited battery life. Drones are also not allowed to fly over sensitive facilities regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or temporarily in certain areas due to weather-related conditions. We developed a mathematical model that incorporates these issues and propose a two-phase constructive and search heuristic algorithm to provide computational efficiency of the real-world cases problems. The result of the numerical study demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.