2018/10/04 by Nils Boysen, Dirk Briskorn, Stefan Fedtke +1
Engineering · #Smart Parking Systems Research #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Vehicle Routing Optimization Methods
paper · doi:10.1002/net.21847
crossref issued 2018/10/04 · crossref published 2018/10/04 · crossref published-online 2018/10/04 · openalex publication_date 2018/10/04 · crossref created 2018/10/05 · crossref published-print 2018/12/01 · crossref deposited 2023/09/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31 · crossref indexed 2026/08/02
Last mile deliveries with unmanned aerial vehicles (also denoted as drones) are seen as one promising idea to reduce excessive road traffic. To overcome the difficulties caused by the comparatively short operating ranges of drones, an innovative concept suggests to apply trucks as mobile landing and take‐off platforms. In this context, the paper on hand schedules the delivery to customers by drones for given truck routes. Given a fixed sequence of stops constituting a truck route and a set of customers to be supplied, we aim at a drone schedule (i.e., a set of trips each defining a drone's take‐off and landing stop and the customer serviced), such that all customers are supplied and the total duration of the delivery tour is minimized. We differentiate whether multiple drones or just a single one are placed on a truck and whether or not take‐off and landing stops have to be identical. We provide an analysis of computational complexity for each resulting subproblem, introduce efficient mixed‐integer programs, and compare all cases with regard to their potential of reducing the delivery effort on the last mile.