The parallel drone scheduling problem with multiple drones and vehicles

Delivery of goods into urban areas constitutes an important issue for logistics service providers. One the most talked-about developments in recent years has been potential use unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, transporting packages, food, medicine, and other goods. by drones offers new possibilities, but also induces challenging routing problems. In this paper, we address extend so-called Parallel Drone Scheduling Traveling Salesman Problem. Basically, problem, deliveries are split between a vehicle one several drones. The performs classical delivery tour from depot, while constrained to perform back forth trips. objective is minimize completion time. We problem considering vehicles. call it Multiple propose hybrid metaheuristic its solution. procedure starts building giant visiting all customers. Then, order determine set vehicles tours (each following defined tour) customers assigned Thirdly, improvement step move Mixed Integer Linear Programming formulation simple branch-and-cut approach. proposed approach validated via experimental campaign on instances taken CVRPLIB1 library. Computational experiments comparing variants give some insights drone system.