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Integration of Drones in Last-Mile Delivery: The Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones

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Operations Research Proceedings 2018

Part of the book series: Operations Research Proceedings ((ORP))

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Abstract

Recently, there has been a surge of interest, from both practitioners and academic researchers, that concerns the utilization of drones for civil applications. In this work, we are interested in studying the Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones (VRPD). In the VRPD, a fleet of vehicles, each of them equipped with a set of drones, is tasked with serving a given set of customers with minimal makespan. A drone may be launched from and recovered by its assigned vehicle and might move at a different velocity. However, compared to vehicles, drones possess a limited flight endurance and carrying capacity. The VRPD can be formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and, consequently, be solved by any standard MILP solver; however, only small-sized instances can be solved within a reasonable amount of time. Hence, for solving large-scale VRPD instances, we propose an algorithm based on Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS). We carried out extensive computational experiments and through our numerical results, we illustrate that drones might be beneficial with regards to a significantly reduced makespan.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the advisers of my Master Thesis, i.e., Mahdi Moeini and Oliver Wendt, for introducing me to this exciting topic and for their continued support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Business Information Systems and Operations Research (BISOR), Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Daniel Schermer

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  1. Daniel Schermer
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Correspondence to Daniel Schermer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Bernard Fortz

  2. Department of Computer Science, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Martine Labbé

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Schermer, D. (2019). Integration of Drones in Last-Mile Delivery: The Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones. In: Fortz, B., Labbé, M. (eds) Operations Research Proceedings 2018. Operations Research Proceedings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18500-8_3

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