Routing and Scheduling for Hybrid Truck-Drone Collaborative Parcel Delivery With Independent and Truck-Carried Drones

Abstract

The enabling Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology has inspired a large number of novel platforms and applications. One popular IoT platform is unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, also known as drone). Benefiting from the intrinsic flexibility, convenience, and low cost, UAVs have great potentials to be utilized in various civil applications, including parcel delivery. However, suffering from limited payloads and battery capacities, it is uneconomical for UAVs to perform parcel delivery tasks independently. To conquer the drawbacks of low payloads and battery capacities, people propose to employ both trucks and drones to construct truck-drone parcel delivery systems. However, previous works only leverage either independent drones or truck-carried drones to collaborate with trucks. In contrast, in this article we propose to simultaneously employ trucks, truck-carried drones, and independent drones to construct a more efficient truck-drone parcel delivery system. We claim that such a hybrid parcel delivery system can fully exploit the complementary benefits of the three platforms. We propose a novel routing and scheduling algorithm, referred to as hybrid truck-drone delivery (HTDD) algorithm, to solve the hybrid parcel delivery problem, wherein $M$ drones carried by $M$ trucks, together with $N$ independent drones, cooperate to deliver parcels to customers distributed in a wide region. The experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the existing solutions which employ either independent drones or truck-carried drones.