Abstract
Under the epidemic, closed management has turned a large number of communities into lonely islands, and the contactless delivery method of UAV has become the rigid demand in this special period. This paper studies a collaborative system of multi-UAV multitruck transportation, which can deliver emergency materials such as medicine to remote areas or closed communities. In this system, delivery tasks are assigned to multiple trucks and multiple drones on each truck can perform delivery tasks in parallel, thereby improving delivery efficiency. We study the routing problem of this system specifically for medical supplying road network and establish mixed-integer model and hybrid algorithm. We show by experiments that the number of trucks has more significant impact on the optimal solution than the number of drones and the performance of hybrid particle swarm optimization is better than the performance of the other algorithms.
Highlights
Under the epidemic, closed management has turned a large number of communities into lonely islands, and the contactless delivery method of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has become the rigid demand in this special period
Compared with pure drone delivery system or pure truck delivery system, this kind of collaborative delivery system has obvious advantages: the truck has a dual role of mobile warehouse and transport resources, which can increase the effective flight range of drones and allow different delivery tasks to be parallelized, and drones can extend the duration of the battery by charging or replacing batteries on trucks, and so on
Our research is similar to the research in Lin et al [1], but our research is aimed at multi-UAV multitruck system, while the research in Lin et al [1] is aimed at multiUAV single-truck system
Summary
Under the epidemic, closed management has turned a large number of communities into lonely islands, and the contactless delivery method of UAV has become the rigid demand in this special period. UAV delivery has obvious disadvantages: the load weight and load capacity of a drone are small, and the flight radius of a drone is short because the drone is powered by a battery One solution to these shortcomings is to allow drones to work together with other types of transportation vehicles to deliver materials, which leads to a new system of collaborative transportation. Lin et al studied the discrete routing optimization of multi-UAV single-truck system on road network and created mixed-integer models and hybrid algorithms [1]. E main innovation point of this paper is to study the collaborative routing problem for the topology structure of road network from a new perspective and propose models and new algorithms to solve the new problem. Our research is similar to the research in Lin et al [1], but our research is aimed at multi-UAV multitruck system, while the research in Lin et al [1] is aimed at multiUAV single-truck system
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
