Hybrid transportation system using trucks and drones

Abstract

In recent years, the use of drones has gained significant attention as a potential solution for delivering goods and services in a variety of industries. Drones offer advantages over traditional delivery methods, including faster delivery times, increased efficiency, and reduced costs. However, their adoption has been limited by challenges related to their operation and regulation, as well as by the complexity of integrating them into existing transportation networks. To address some of these challenges, we present a novel approach to dispatching a hybrid truck and drone delivery system for serving a set of clients. Our proposal uses OR-Tools, an open-source optimization toolkit, for providing an initial truck tour, and a greedy heuristic method for introducing drone service into this route. We consider that at the starting point, the drone is on the truck. During the tour, the hybrid tandem of vehicles ensures that all the nodes of the initial tour are visited, either by the truck, or by the drone. When both vehicles arrive at final node, the time needed is computed. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal, we tested it on an instance of the Traveling Salesman Problem in Romania and compared our results with those based on the Concorde solver, a widely used exact algorithm for solving this problem. Our results demonstrate that our solution is stable, and performs well, indicating that our approach can be a useful tool for efficiently programming the service of hybrid delivery systems.