Combining Heuristics and Constraint Programming for the Parallel Drone Scheduling Vehicle Routing Problem with Collective Drones

Roberto Montemanni, Mauro Dell'Amico, Andrea Corsini

Abstract: Last-mile delivery problems where trucks and drones collaborate to deliver goods to final customers are considered. We focus on settings where a fleet with several homogeneous trucks work in parallel to collaborative drones, able to combine with each other to optimize speed and power consumption for deliveries. A heuristic for the min-max vehicle routing problem is coupled with constraint programming models, leading to an effective method able to provide several state-of-the-art solutions for the instances commonly adopted in the literature.