Route Optimization for Vehicle-Drone Coordinated Delivery in Rural End-point Logistics Operations
The comprehensive implementation of the rural revitalization strategy injects vitality into the rural economy and greatly improves the consumption capacity and consumption environment of rural resi-dents.However,due to the overall poor distribution environment in rural areas,the widely dispersed cus-tomer points and the underdeveloped logistics facilities,especially in western China,where the terrain is mostly highland and mountain,the end-point logistics operations in these areas are very cost-ineffective.Seeing that in recent years,drone delivery has received widespread attention as an addition to the traditional vehicle-based delivery practice and to address the issues of high cost and low efficiency in rural end-point logistics delivery,in this paper,we propose a vehicle-drone coordinated delivery model.This model focuses on the rural consumer end formed by"rural township,village,and rural residents,"simplifies the"rural township-village-rural residents"three-level delivery system into rural township-level delivery points,village-level transfer stations,and rural resident customer points.Based on the tradition-al two-level vehicle delivery model,it adopts a vehicle-drone coordinated delivery model which considers constraints such as the maximum endurance and maximum load of drones,constructs a mathematical model aimed at minimizing the total delivery cost and solves it using the ant colony algorithm.Next through nu-merical experiments conducted using three different customer distribution datasets from the Solomon data-base,it demonstrates the effectiveness of the model and algorithm.The results show that:(1)Compared to the traditional vehicle-only delivery model,the coordinated delivery model can significantly reduce the total cost of rural end-point delivery,by an especially large margin when the customer points are clustered;(2)The involvement of drones has significant impact on the total cost of the coordinated delivery model,as lon-ger drone routes can bring down the fixed usage costs of the drones while also reduce the total cost since less vehicles are required for the delivery to the customer points.In practice,the usage of vehicles and drones should be reasonably arranged to minimize the delivery cost.This paper proposes an innovative rural end-point logistics delivery model,providing a new solution for rural logistics delivery.Future research can further optimize the algorithm and conduct case studies using ac-tual scenario data to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the model and algorithm in practical applica-tions.
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