HEURISTIC ALGORITHM TO SOLVE VEHICLE ROUTING PROBLEM WITH DRONES

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones (VRPD), which is primarily a special case of the classic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The objective is to coordinate the use of trucks and drones to carry out deliveries in order to optimize costs and delivery times. A precise mathematical model is proposed, taking into account transportation constraints, drone endurance, and the demand that must be satisfied within specified time windows. For the solution approach, we presented a two-phase heuristic algorithm. In the first phase, we solve the problem using only trucks in delivery. To find the routes of each truck, we used two methods : the first one is solving a capacitated vehicle routing problem exactly by a branch-and-bound algorithm, and the other one is a route-first cluster-second heuristic. The second phase involved the insertion of drones into each truck route by an heuristic algorithm.