Cooperated Truck-Drone Routing With Drone Energy Consumption and Time Windows

Considering customer time windows, multiple trucks, each equipped with a multi-visit drone, are employed. For realism, the drone energy consumption and the impact of payload variation on the energy consumption rate are considered. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is developed to formulate the problem. A novel concept called “Segment” is introduced to promote the cooperation between trucks and drones. Based on this, a heuristic is designed where the drone and truck routes are constructed synchronously. The variable neighborhood search algorithm is integrated with simulated annealing to enhance solutions further. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated through both Solomon instances and practical cases.