Capacitated Multi Drone Assisted Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

Transportation is developing rapidly with today’s technology. By following different methods in every field, sustainable and low-cost transportation systems are tried to be created. Vehicle routing problems (VRP), which differ according to the fields, have been defined to produce solutions for these purposes. These differences occur according to the vehicles, nodes, and time limitations in the system. In much of the literature on VRPs, transportation varies according to the modes used, and these are referred to as air, land, and water transport. However, transportation modes that can operate as a hybrid, that is, integrated at the same time, have emerged with the development of technology. In this study, new generation vehicle routing problems integrated with emerging technology have been studied and, unlike other studies, a mixed integer programming model has been developed for the Multiple-Drone Assisted Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (mDroneCVRP), which minimizes the time of the last vehicle arriving at the warehouse. As the most important contribution, the assumption that drones take off from the same vehicle and land on the same vehicle in other studies has been stretched, thus providing the opportunity to take off and land from different vehicles. A constructive heuristic based on a greedy procedure is also developed and its solutions are compared with the MIP solution to analyze the performance of the algorithm.