Dynamic Programming Approaches for the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone

Paul Bouman, Niels Agatz and Marie Schmidt

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: A promising new delivery model involves the use of a delivery truck that collaborates with a drone to make deliveries. Effectively combining a truck and a drone gives rise to a new planning problem that is known as the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone (TSP-D). This paper presents exact solution approaches for the TSP-D based on dynamic programming and provides an experimental comparison of these approach. Our numerical experiments show that our approach can solve larger problems than the mathematical programming approaches that have been presented in the literature thus far. Moreover, we show that restrictions on the number of locations the truck can visit while the drone is away can help significantly reduce the solution times while having relatively little impact on the overall solution quality.

Keywords: Traveling salesman problem; Vehicle routing; Drones; Dynamic Programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24
Date: 2017-09-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/101691/ERS-2017-011-LIS_v01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:eureri:101691

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).