Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have the potential to significantly reduce the cost and time of making last-mile deliveries and responding to emergencies. Despite this potential, little work has gone into developing vehicle routing problems (VRPs) specifically for drone delivery scenarios. Existing VRPs are insufficient for planning drone deliveries: either multiple trips to the depot are not permitted, leading to solutions with excess drones, or the effect of battery and payload weight on energy consumption is not considered, leading to costly or infeasible routes. We propose two multitrip VRPs for drone delivery that address both issues. One minimizes costs subject to a delivery time limit, while the other minimizes the overall delivery time subject to a budget constraint. We mathematically derive and experimentally validate an energy consumption model for multirotor drones, demonstrating that energy consumption varies approximately linearly with payload and battery weight. We use this approximation to derive mixed integer linear programs for our VRPs. We propose a cost function that considers our energy consumption model and drone reuse, and apply it in a simulated annealing (SA) heuristic for finding suboptimal solutions to practical scenarios. To assist drone delivery practitioners with balancing cost and delivery time, the SA heuristic is used to show that the minimum cost has an inverse exponential relationship with the delivery time limit, and the minimum overall delivery time has an inverse exponential relationship with the budget. Numerical results confirm the importance of reusing drones and optimizing battery size in drone delivery VRPs.
A VRP that reuses vehicles is known as a multi-trip vehicle routing problem (MTVRP), first proposed by B. Fleischmann @cite_8 . While a number of approaches are available for solving the MTVRP, such as a large neighborhood search algorithm @cite_14 , a hybrid genetic algorithm with a local search operator @cite_35 , a variable neighborhood search algorithm @cite_30 , and a branch-and-price algorithm @cite_38 , none appear to consider energy consumption as a function of vehicle weight. Routes found by the above approaches may be infeasible or unnecessarily costly in a drone delivery scenario, with batteries that are larger than necessary or too heavy to carry. In ssec:battery-optimization we demonstrate that optimizing battery weight can reduce costs. Battery weight cannot be optimized without modeling energy consumption as a function of vehicle weight: the model is used to find the battery energy, and therefore weight, required to complete each route. The DDPs proposed in this paper apply our linear energy consumption model to optimize battery weight and payload weight, ensuring that the routes found are low-cost and feasible.
@cite_30 @cite_35 @cite_38 @cite_14 @cite_8
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Display Omitted This research proposes the hybrid vehicle routing problem (HVRP), which is an extension of the green vehicle routing problem.A simulated annealing (SA) heuristic is proposed to solve HVRP.Computational results show that the proposed SA effectively solves HVRP.Sensitivity analysis has been conducted to understand the effect of hybrid vehicles and charging stations on the travel cost. This study proposes the Hybrid Vehicle Routing Problem (HVRP), which is an extension of the Green Vehicle Routing Problem (G-VRP). We focus on vehicles that use a hybrid power source, known as the Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) and generate a mathematical model to minimize the total cost of travel by driving PHEV. Moreover, the model considers the utilization of electric and fuel power depending on the availability of either electric charging or fuel stations.We develop simulated annealing with a restart strategy (SA_RS) to solve this problem, and it consists of two versions. The first version determines the acceptance probability of a worse solution using the Boltzmann function, denoted as SA_RSBF. The second version employs the Cauchy function to determine the acceptance probability of a worse solution, denoted as SA_RSCF. The proposed SA algorithm is first verified with benchmark data of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), with the result showing that it performs well and confirms its efficiency in solving CVRP. Further analysis show that SA_RSCF is preferable compared to SA_RSBF and that SA with a restart strategy performs better than without a restart strategy. We next utilize the SA_RSCF method to solve HVRP. The numerical experiment presents that vehicle type and the number of electric charging stations have an impact on the total travel cost. The present paper examines a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) of major practical importance which is referred to as the Load-Dependent VRP (LDVRP). LDVRP is applicable for transportation activities where the weight of the transported cargo accounts for a significant part of the vehicle gross weight. Contrary to the basic VRP which calls for the minimization of the distance travelled, the LDVRP objective is aimed at minimizing the total product of the distance travelled and the gross weight carried along this distance. Thus, it is capable of producing sensible routing plans which take into account the variation of the cargo weight along the vehicle trips. The LDVRP objective is closely related to the total energy requirements of the vehicle fleet, making it a credible alternative when the environmental aspects of transportation activities are examined and optimized. A novel LDVRP extension which considers simultaneous pick-up and delivery service is introduced, formulated and solved for the first time. To deal with large-scale instances of the examined problems, we propose a local-search algorithm. Towards an efficient implementation, the local-search algorithm employs a computational scheme which calculates the complex weighted-distance objective changes in constant time. Solution results are presented for both problems on a variety of well-known test cases demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed solution approach. The structure of the obtained LDVRP and VRP solutions is compared in pursuit of interesting conclusions on the relative suitability of the two routing models, when the decision maker must deal with the weighted distance objective. In addition, results of a branch-and-cut procedure for small-scale instances of the LDVRP with simultaneous pick-ups and deliveries are reported. Finally, extensive computational experiments have been performed to explore the managerial implications of three key problem characteristics, namely the deviation of customer demands, the cargo to tare weight ratio, as well as the size of the available vehicle fleet. Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have the potential to significantly reduce the cost and time of making last-mile deliveries and responding to emergencies. Despite this potential, little work has gone into developing vehicle routing problems (VRPs) specifically for drone delivery scenarios. Existing VRPs are insufficient for planning drone deliveries: either multiple trips to the depot are not permitted, leading to solutions with excess drones, or the effect of battery and payload weight on energy consumption is not considered, leading to costly or infeasible routes. We propose two multitrip VRPs for drone delivery that address both issues. One minimizes costs subject to a delivery time limit, while the other minimizes the overall delivery time subject to a budget constraint. We mathematically derive and experimentally validate an energy consumption model for multirotor drones, demonstrating that energy consumption varies approximately linearly with payload and battery weight. We use this approximation to derive mixed integer linear programs for our VRPs. We propose a cost function that considers our energy consumption model and drone reuse, and apply it in a simulated annealing (SA) heuristic for finding suboptimal solutions to practical scenarios. To assist drone delivery practitioners with balancing cost and delivery time, the SA heuristic is used to show that the minimum cost has an inverse exponential relationship with the delivery time limit, and the minimum overall delivery time has an inverse exponential relationship with the budget. Numerical results confirm the importance of reusing drones and optimizing battery size in drone delivery VRPs. This paper proposes a new cost function based on distance and load of the vehicle for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem. The vehicle-routing problem with this new load-based cost objective is called the Energy Minimizing Vehicle Routing Problem (EMVRP). Integer linear programming formulations with O(n2) binary variables and O(n2) constraints are developed for the collection and delivery cases, separately. The proposed models are tested and illustrated by classical Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) instances from the literature using CPLEX 8.0.