Carrier-vehicle system for delivery in city environments

摘要

In this paper we present an extension of the carrier-vehicle problem for the case of delivery in an urban environment. The small vehicle, namely a drone, performs the delivery of goods at the customer address while the large vehicle is in charge of transporting, launching, recovering and servicing the drone. In this work it is assumed that the take-off and landing points are not at the location of the customer but fixed spots predefined by the city. In this context, the truck is allowed to advance during the drone delivery, providing a landing location closer to the following client and reducing the route completion time. The selection of these spots is restricted by the autonomy of the drone and the velocity of both vehicles. The urban environment is addressed by defining a different distance metric for the aerial and the terrestrial vehicle, respectively. The paper presents a mixed-integer linear programming formulation which allows to solve the given problem of computing the truck routes and selecting the optimal takeoff/landing spots in reasonable time. Illustrative examples of this problem and a computational analysis of the presented solution conclude the paper.