A modelling and solution approach for wind-affected drone-truck routing problem under uncertainty

Abstract

In the field of logistics and transportation, drones and trucks effectively enhance each other’s capabilities by offering complementary benefits in terms of speed, cargo capacity, and charging frequency. Thus, efficient management of their collaboration is an important task. Although there is a vast literature addressing different aspects of drone-truck combined operations (DTCO), only a few studies incorporate the energy consumption of drones into the optimization model, and the existing ones have made simplified assumptions. This paper proposes an optimization model for DTCO by incorporating a comprehensive energy function affected by the drone speed, cargo weight, wind speed, and wind direction, paying attention to environmental viewpoints. Due to this energy function, the problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model. To enhance tractability and efficiency, we provide a linear approximation for the MINLP model. Given the stochastic nature of wind conditions throughout the day, we extend the deterministic model as a scenario-based stochastic one. Incorporating uncertainty makes the model more complex and hence, we adopt a modified progressive hedging algorithm (PHA) to efficiently solve the model. Computational results over a variety of instances confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.