On a cooperative truck-and-drone delivery system

Abstract During the last decade drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, have been intensively studied from various perspectives. Important advances in drone technology and numerous experiments concerning drone infusion in various services and businesses have generated intensive research on modeling delivery systems that include drones. Combinatorial Optimization Problems such as Traveling Salesman Problem and Vehicle Routing Problem have been extended by considering drones and optimize various cost functions. This paper introduces a new greedy heuristic for minimizing the total transportation time of a truck-and-drone delivery system, proposes a new cost function to include the flying time of the drone and performs a comparison with previous similar approaches. Experiments with different parameter settings on two large area Traveling Salesman Problem instances show significant total time savings for the proposed approach and supports future research when considering real-world scenarios.