Mixed Delivery and Pickup Vehicle Routing Problem With Limited Flow and Assignment of Drones in an Urban Network

Abstract

A new variant of the delivery and pickup transportation problem called mixed delivery and pickup routing problem with unmanned aerial vehicles in case of limited flow is introduced. The objective is to minimize operational costs including total transportation costs and service time at each point. This variant is a solution for the urban congestion, and consequently, it is an improvement of the general transport system. First, the problem is formulated mathematically. It is considered as NP-hard; therefore, the authors proposed an iterated local search algorithm to solve the problem of mixed pickup and delivery without drone. Then, a vehicle first-drone second algorithm is used to solve the mixed delivery and pickup problem with drone. The performance of the method is compared through numerical experiments based on instance derived from the literature as well as on a set of randomly generated instances. Numerical results have shown that proposed metaheuristic method performs consistently well in terms of both the quality of the solution and the computational time when using drone with vehicle.