Collaborative traveling salesman problem with ground vehicle as a charger for unmanned aerial vehicle

ABSTRACT

Innovation in logistics industry is now implicit, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is at the center of logistics innovation. To effectively utilize unmanned aerial vehicles for last-mile delivery, collaborative delivery using ground vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles has recently been investigated. However, previous studies neglected proper management of batteries, assuming their constant replacement whenever unmanned aerial vehicles land, and hence numerous batteries are required for unmanned aerial vehicles. Given this research gap, we present a new routing model for collaborative delivery wherein an unmanned aerial vehicle uses a ground vehicle as a power source. A mathematical formulation is presented, and noticing the complexity, a heuristic algorithm is developed. We present a case study to verify the operational efficiency of the model. We test the performance of the heuristic and draw insights based on geographical locations of customers via computational experiments.

KEYWORDS:

• Electric unmanned aerial vehicle
• traveling salesman problem
• collaborative delivery
• Mixed-integer linear program
• Heuristics

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2021R1F1A1059302) and also supported under the framework of international cooperation program managed by the National Research Foundation of Korea (No. NRF-2021K2A9A2A06047937, FY2021).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2021K2A9A2A06047937, FY2021]; National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2021R1F1A1059302].