The Traveling Salesman Drone Station Location Problem

In this paper, we introduce the Traveling Salesman Drone Station Location Problem (TSDSLP). The TSDSLP exhibits features of the Traveling Salesman, Facility Location, and Parallel Machine Scheduling problems. More precisely, given a truck located at a central depot, a multitude of possible drone stations, and a set of customer locations, the TSDSLP seeks for a feasible routing of the truck and drone operations such that all requests are fulfilled, no more than a given number of drone stations is used, and the makespan (or operational cost) is minimized. We formulate the TSDSLP as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and use the state-of-the-art solver Gurobi to obtain solutions for small- and medium-sized instances. Through our numerical results, we show that the utilization of drone stations might reduce the makespan significantly.

[1]  Mahdi Moeini,et al.  A matheuristic for the vehicle routing problem with drones and its variants , 2019, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.

[2]  Sebastian Magierowski,et al.  Vehicle Routing Problems for Drone Delivery , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.

[3]  Chase C. Murray,et al.  The flying sidekick traveling salesman problem: Optimization of drone-assisted parcel delivery , 2015 .

[4]  Mahdi Moeini,et al.  A hybrid VNS/Tabu search algorithm for solving the vehicle routing problem with drones and en route operations , 2019, Comput. Oper. Res..

[5]  Bruce L. Golden,et al.  The vehicle routing problem with drones: several worst-case results , 2017, Optim. Lett..

[6]  Hokey Min,et al.  Combined location-routing problems: A synthesis and future research directions , 1998, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[7]  R. A. Zemlin,et al.  Integer Programming Formulation of Traveling Salesman Problems , 1960, JACM.

[8]  Sungwoo Kim,et al.  Traveling Salesman Problem With a Drone Station , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.

[9]  Saïd Salhi,et al.  Location-routing: Issues, models and methods , 2007, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[10]  Mahdi Moeini,et al.  Algorithms for Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones , 2018, ACIIDS.

[11]  Marie Schmidt,et al.  Optimization Approaches for the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone , 2016, Transp. Sci..

[12]  Miguel A. Figliozzi,et al.  Maximum coverage capacitated facility location problem with range constrained drones , 2019, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.

[13]  Bruce L. Golden,et al.  Optimization approaches for civil applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or aerial drones: A survey , 2018, Networks.