Coordinated logistics with trucks and drones for premium delivery

Abstract

Last-mile delivery, the final stage of the delivery process before a package arrives at a customer's address, has emerged as an important business opportunity for inland transportation. As people's perception of last-mile delivery has changed, more customers are using premium delivery services to get the delivery at a specific time rather than just pursuing free shipping. In order to satisfy the new trend of logistics, we propose a delivery system in which several drones and trucks work together to provide service to customers within given time windows. In addition, pair constraints, which considered a truck and a drone as a pair, are relaxed to determine more flexible delivery plans. A three-stage savings-based heuristic procedure was also developed based on the concept of savings to determine the operations of trucks and drones in real-world settings. We found that the drone efficiently responds to urgent delivery requests from customers and that a delivery system that utilises both trucks and drones provides substantial benefits.

Keywords:

• Vehicle routing problem
• drone
• last-mile delivery
• savings algorithm

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to five anonymous reviewers for their specific comments and constructive suggestions on this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grants funded by the Korean government (Ministry of Science and ICT) [Grants No. RS-2023-00218913 and NRF-2022R1C1C2011030].