Coordinated logistics with trucks and drones for premium delivery

Abstract

Last-mile delivery, the final stage of the delivery process before a package arrives at a customer's address, has emerged as an important business opportunity for inland transportation. As people's perception of last-mile delivery has changed, more customers are using premium delivery services to get the delivery at a specific time rather than just pursuing free shipping. In order to satisfy the new trend of logistics, we propose a delivery system in which several drones and trucks work together to provide service to customers within given time windows. In addition, pair constraints, which considered a truck and a drone as a pair, are relaxed to determine more flexible delivery plans. A three-stage savings-based heuristic procedure was also developed based on the concept of savings to determine the operations of trucks and drones in real-world settings. We found that the drone efficiently responds to urgent delivery requests from customers and that a delivery system that utilises both trucks and drones provides substantial benefits.