Research of Drone-Truck Collaborative Delivery Path Optimization Based on Two-stage Heuristic Algorithm

With the rapid development of e-commerce, the logistics industry is confronting the important challenge of catering for the rapidly growing customer demand. As an emerging vehicle, delivery using truck and drones have played an increasing role in satisfying customers demand for fast, flexible and reliable delivery services. Drones and trucks work together to deliver packages cooperatively, a new delivery model that has been proven to reduce overall costs, CO2 emissions and delivery times. This paper studies the problem of drone-truck cooperative distribution route optimization, establishes a mixed integer programming model, and proposes a two-stage heuristic algorithm including the nearest neighbor algorithm and K-means clustering, as well as the hybridization of variable neighborhood simulated annealing algorithm to solve the drone-vehicle routing problem (Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones, VRP-D). Through the analysis and discussion of the experimental results, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified.