The Multi-visits Drone-Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Pickup and Delivery Service

The development of convergent technology makes the drone expected to become a commercial delivery method for terminal logistics distribution. Although the industry has begun to experiment with the coordinated transportation of drones and vehicles, some limited assumptions have been made to reduce the complexity of synchronization. This paper studies the mathematical formulations and efficient solution methodologies for the multi-visits drone-vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery service (MDVRPSPD), whose objective is to minimize the distance traveled by drones and vehicles and the total number of drones used. To solve the MDVRPSPD problem, a three-stage solution method is designed. Firstly, the scalable K-means++ algorithm is used to determine the vehicle’s parking location, and we optimize the vehicle’s driving route by traveling salesman problem (TSP) modeling; then, the classic tabu search algorithm is extended to arrange the schedule of drones which consider multi-visits and simultaneous pickup and delivery service. Meanwhile, a set of extensive computational experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of developed heuristics and the superiority of drone-vehicle delivery system on delivery issues.