The two‐echelon routing problem with truck and drones

In this paper, we study novel variants of the well-known two-echelon vehicle routing problem in which a truck works on first echelon to transport parcels and fleet drones intermediate depots while second echelon, are used deliver from customers. The objective is minimize completion time instead transportation cost as classical problems. Depending context, drone can be launched at an depot once (single-trip drone) or several times (multiple-trip drone). Mixed-integer linear programming models proposed formulate mathematically problems solve optimality small-sized instances. To handle larger instances, metaheuristic based idea greedy randomized adaptive search procedure introduced. main feature our lies design initial solution construction local operators, cover all decision layers run using additional data structures. Experimental results obtained instances different contexts reported analyzed.