The traveling salesman problem with drone resupply

Michael Dienstknecht (), Nils Boysen () and Dirk Briskorn ()
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Michael Dienstknecht: Bergische Universität Wuppertal
Nils Boysen: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Dirk Briskorn: Bergische Universität Wuppertal

OR Spectrum: Quantitative Approaches in Management, 2022, vol. 44, issue 4, No 2, 1045-1086

Abstract: Abstract This paper treats a variant of the famous Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which is extended to cover the peculiarities of a novel, drone-based distribution concept in last-mile logistics. In this context, the salesman represents the driver of a home delivery truck. Given a set of customers to be visited, the truck has a limited capacity, so that only a subset of shipments can be loaded on board when leaving the depot. The remainder of the shipments has to be resupplied to the truck on its tour by a single unmanned aerial vehicle (drone). In order to do so, the drone picks up shipments (one by one) at the depot and delivers them toward the truck. Our extension of the TSP aims at a tour of the truck through the set of given customers and a resupply schedule for the drone, so that the total delivery costs are minimized. We develop suited optimization approaches and apply them in static and dynamic problem settings. We, furthermore, benchmark the savings enabled by drone resupply with alternative home delivery options with and without drone support. Our results show that drone resupply promises substantial rewards when applied in the right delivery context.

Keywords: Scheduling; Dynamic programming; Last-mile logistics; Traveling salesman problem; Unmanned aerial vehicles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s00291-022-00680-1

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