UAV-Assisted Routing Algorithm for Truck Parcel Delivery

This paper studies how UAVs can efficiently deliver parcels with trucks in rural areas. Due to the limited payload of the UAVs, they can only serve the parcels under the pay-load limitation, and the other parcels are delivered by truck. Furthermore, the battery capacities of the UAVs are limited, and they cannot deliver all parcels at once. The UAV will take off from the truck to deliver parcels and then meet with the truck to load new parcels and change the new battery for the next trip. For UAV safety considerations, the truck must wait at the rendezvous node for the UAV to land. Our paper aims to deliver all the parcels as quickly as possible. Since the problem is NP-hard, we proposed a three-stage heuristic algorithm to solve this problem. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the candidate algorithms in minimizing task completion time.