Multi-Objective Optimization Algorithm With Adaptive Resource Allocation for Truck-Drone Collaborative Delivery and Pick-Up Services

To efficiently implement the truck-drone collaborative logistics system, we introduce a multi-objective truck-drone collaborative routing problem with delivery and pick-up services (MCRP-DP). A truck collaborating with a fleet of drones serves three types of customers that require delivery, pick-up, and simultaneous delivery & pick-up services, respectively. Different from most of the existing studies where the drone visits only one customer in a flight, we allow the drone to serve another customer requiring pick-up service when it completes a delivery service. Meanwhile, we simultaneously optimize three objectives: transportation costs, waiting time of vehicles (i.e., truck and drone), and service reliability. To solve MCRP-DP, we propose an objective space decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm with adaptive resource allocation (ODEA-ARA). In ODEA-ARA, an objective space decomposition strategy is used to maintain the diversity while an adaptive resource allocation strategy is designed to improve convergence. We design an ensemble of relative improvement and relative contribution to assist the resource allocation and a variable neighborhood Pareto local search integrating 7 problem-specific neighborhood structures to improve the solution. Extensive computational experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of ODEA-ARA. The experimental results show that ODEA-ARA outperforms its competitors. Meanwhile, several useful managerial insights are presented.