Inverting the Truck-Drone Network Problem to Find Best Case Configuration

Robert Rich

Advances in Operations Research, 2020, vol. 2020, 1-10

Abstract:

Many industries are looking for ways to economically use truck/rail/ship fitted with drone technologies to augment the “last mile” delivery effort. While drone technologies abound, few, if any studies look at the proper configuration of the drone based on significant features of the problem: delivery density, operating area, drone range, and speed. Here, we first present the truck-drone problem and then invert the network routing problem such that the best case drone speed and range are fitted to the truck for a given scenario based on the network delivery density. By inverting the problem, a business can quickly determine the drone configuration (proper drone range and speed) necessary to optimize the delivery system. Additionally, we provide a more usable version of the truck-drone routing problem as a mixed integer program that can be easily adopted with standardized software used to solve linear programming. Furthermore, our computational metaheuristics and experiments conducted in support of this work are available for download. The metaheuristics used herein surpass current best-in-class algorithms found in literature.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/AOR/2020/4053983.pdf (application/pdf)
http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/AOR/2020/4053983.xml (text/xml)

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:hin:jnlaor:4053983

DOI: 10.1155/2020/4053983

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Advances in Operations Research from Hindawi
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mohamed Abdelhakeem ().