Synchronized Drone and Truck Routing Problem: A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective

This paper introduces a synchronized truck and drone routing problem consisting a fleet of capacitated trucks and drones dispatching last-mile deliveries. Each truck, while traveling on its route to serve customers, could stop and launch drones which perform multiple back and forth trips between the truck and one or more delivery destination, serving one customer at a time. The synchronization between trucks and drones moves is mandatory since the drone is launched and retrieved by the truck, that should wait for delivery completion and drone retrieval. Following a multi-stakeholder perspective, different customer- and business-oriented objectives are included to account for the presence of different (public an private) actors and end-users with conflicting interests and preferences. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer program to determine the optimal truck routes and sequence of drone trips under the synchronization assumption. The proposed model is then solved by a meta-heuristic solution approach.