Truck-drone team logistics: A heuristic approach to multi-drop route planning

Recently there have been significant developments and applications in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In a few years, these applications will be fully integrated into our lives. The practical application and use of UAVs presents several problems that are of a different nature to the specific technology of the components involved. Among them, the most relevant problem deriving from the use of UAVs in logistics distribution tasks is the so-called “last mile” delivery. In the present work, we focus on the resolution of the truck-drone team logistics problem. The problems of tandem routing have a complex structure and have only been partially addressed in the scientific literature. The use of UAVs raises a series of restrictions and considerations that did not appear previously in routing problems; most notably, aspects such as the limited power-life of batteries used by the UAVs and the determination of rendezvous points where they are replaced by fully-charged new batteries. These difficulties have until now limited the mathematical formulation of truck-drone routing problems and their resolution to mainly small-size cases. To overcome these limitations we propose an iterated greedy heuristic based on the iterative process of destruction and reconstruction of solutions. This process is orchestrated by a global optimization scheme using a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. We test our approach in a large set of instances of different sizes taken from literature. The obtained results are quite promising, even for large-size scenarios.