The Collaboration Routing of Heterogeneous Vehicles on Traveling Salesman Problem

It has been realized that the cooperation between Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) can bring great benefits in delivery recently. The collaborative system with a UGV and a UAV can also be applied to inspection, searching and so on, where the UAV works continuously before returning to the UGV. The scenario is abstracted as the collaboration of heterogeneous vehicles on traveling salesman problem, called HCVTSP in this paper. To minimize the mission completion time of HCVTSP, a mixed linear integer programming (MILP) model is built. In order to quickly solve the larger scale HCVTSP , a heuristic algorithm called heterogeneous collaboration vehicles iterative local search (HCVILS) is proposed. The experiments confirmed that the heuristic algorithm performs much better than MILP in terms of running time compromising the quality of the solution negligibly. Numerous instances are used for comparing the solutions of HCVTSP with an existing model while the UAV works discontinuously for delivery. The results show that the solution of HCVTSP is superior to the other in both mission completion time and length of truck's path.