23rd Conference of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies
Abstract Submission

1385. The Vehicle Routing Problem with Drone-Based Replenishment at Transshipment Platforms

Invited abstract in session TE-29: Last Mile Delivery, cluster Location, Network Design, and Routing.

Tuesday, 16:15-17:45
Room: FENH302

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Juan Carlos Pina Pardo
Center for Transportation and Logistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Matthias Winkenbach
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

We study a last-mile delivery problem, where customer orders become available for dispatch at various times throughout the delivery horizon. Once delivery trucks have started their routes, last-mile logistics operators normally use two strategies to manage the arrival of new orders: instruct an en-route truck to return to the depot to collect these orders or dispatch a new truck to deliver them. In this presentation, we investigate an innovative alternative for this problem: drones can be used to send newly available orders to transshipment platforms strategically located throughout the delivery area, where en-route trucks collect them for delivery. We leverage the problem's decision structure to formulate the problem as a two-stage mixed-integer linear program, where the first stage defines truck routes and the second stage the optimal transshipment decisions. To solve the problem, we propose an exact solution framework based on the integer L-shaped method, solving both the truck-and-drone and truck-only versions of the problem. The exact solution framework is enhanced with several problem-specific valid inequalities. Through extensive numerical experiments, we show the benefits of this new drone-based resupply strategy to reduce the number of truck return trips to the depot, expand truck capacity over time, and reduce customer waiting times.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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