A Novel Service System for Long-Distance Drone Delivery Using the “Ant Colony+A*” Algorithm

Drones, with the potential to significantly increase the efficiency of the delivery, have received much attention in recent years. Still, there are some bottleneck problems in the application of the long-distance drone delivery, such as the limited flight range and flight safety. Therefore, the article proposes a novel service system, including the battery exchange stations and maintenance checkpoints, to provide long-distance delivery services. Then, with respect to the service system, we construct a drone path programming model, where a special penalty value is proposed as the objective function to simultaneously minimize the path length and number of landing depots for the delivery service. Thereafter, to efficiently find the optimal flight path among huge solution space, we improve the ant colony optimization with the A ^* algorithm embedded to avoid the nondirectional searching of ants. Finally, we use a case of Shanghai city to study the feasibility and effectiveness of our approaches, which includes the comparison of our algorithm and the other three heuristics on ten random delivery cases, the verification of the effectiveness of our algorithm on the long-distance delivery service, and a sensitive analysis of the effect of the depot number on the optimal solution.