Truck-multidrone same-day delivery strategies: On-road resupply vs depot return

Abstract

This paper explores an enhanced two-waved same-day delivery (SDD) system that leverages a mothership truck equipped with multiple drones supported by an auxiliary “resupply” truck. Under standard SDD operations, this mothership truck, also capable of performing deliveries, must return to the depot to reload, incurring extra travel time and mileage. In contrast, the proposed resupply strategy enables the second delivery wave by dispatching a secondary vehicle to meet the mothership truck on-road, reloading parcels without interrupting ongoing deliveries by the drones. A single unified routing framework, the Genetic Algorithm with Iterated Estimations for Resupply (GAIER), is presented to optimise both strategies under two selectable criteria: minimising total service time or total truck mileage.

In tests with benchmark networks of different sizes (20, 50, and 75 nodes), incorporating a resupply truck reduced every selected criterion when compared to the strategy where the mothership vehicle returns to the depot. Subsequent comparative analysis points an average reduction of 17 % in service time and 21 % in truck mileage while statistical analyses support the strategy choice significancy, confirming resupply strategy’s potential for cost savings and reduced environmental impact. These findings bolster our proposition that incorporating a resupply truck into hybrid truck-multidrone systems enhances flexibility in drone delivery scheduling and improves the system’s ability to meet urban demand.