Related papers: The En Route Truck-Drone Delivery Problem
This work focuses on exact methods for a Simultaneous Vehicle Routing and Crew Scheduling Problem in long-haul transport. Pickup-and-delivery requests with time windows must be fullfiled over a multi-day planning horizon. Unlike some…
The problem of maximizing the probability of two trucks being coordinated to merge into a platoon on a highway is considered. Truck platooning is a promising technology that allows heavy vehicles to save fuel by driving with small…
Quantum computing holds transformative potential for optimizing large-scale drone fleet operations, yet its near-term limitations necessitate hybrid approaches blending classical and quantum techniques. This work introduces Quantum Unmanned…
In the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drones (TSP-mD), a truck and multiple drones cooperate to serve customers in the minimum amount of time. The drones are launched and retrieved by the truck at customer locations, and each of their…
High-tech giants and start-ups are investing in drone technologies to provide urban air delivery service, which is expected to solve the last-mile problem and mitigate road traffic congestion. However, air delivery service will not scale up…
Coordination of local and global aerial traffic has become a legal and technological bottleneck as the number of unmanned vehicles in the common airspace continues to grow. To meet this challenge, automation and decentralization of control…
Rapidly generating an optimal chasing motion of a drone to follow a dynamic target among obstacles is challenging due to numerical issues rising from multiple conflicting objectives and non-convex constraints. This study proposes to resolve…
We consider an e-commerce retailer operating a supply chain that consists of middle- and last-mile transportation, and study its ability to deliver products stored in warehouses within a day from customer's order time. Successful next-day…
The use of drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for aerial photography and cinematography is becoming widespread. The following optimization problem has been recently considered. Let us imagine a sporting event where a group of runners…
The Stacker Crane Problem is NP-Hard and the best known approximation algorithm only provides a 9/5 approximation ratio. The objective of this paper is threefold. First, by embedding the problem within a stochastic framework, we present a…
Drone swarms are required for the simultaneous delivery of multiple packages. We demonstrate a multi-stop drone swarm-based delivery in a smart city. We leverage formation flying to conserve energy and increase the flight range of a drone…
In this paper, we consider a large-scale instance of the classical Pickup-and-Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem (PDVRP) that must be solved by a network of mobile cooperating robots. Robots must self-coordinate and self-allocate a set of…
The Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem (FSTSP) considers a delivery system composed by a truck and a drone. The drone launches from the truck with a single package to deliver to a customer. Each drone must return to the truck to…
Service delivery is set to experience a major paradigm shift with fast advances in drone technologies coupled with higher expectations from customers and increased competition. We propose a novel service-oriented approach to enable the…
We propose an efficient branch-and-cut algorithm to exactly solve the parallel drone scheduling traveling salesman problem. Our algorithm can find optimal solutions for all but two existing instances with up to 229 customers in a reasonable…
In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the time-optimal trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming…
Two-echelon distribution systems are attractive from an economical standpoint and help to keep large vehicles out of city centers. Large trucks can be used to deliver goods to intermediate facilities in accessible locations, whereas smaller…
The focus of this research is to evaluate the use of drones for the delivery of pediatric vaccines in remote areas of low income and low and middle income countries. Delivering vaccines in these regions is challenging because of the…
We investigate algorithmic approaches for targeted drug delivery in a complex, maze-like environment, such as a vascular system. The basic scenario is given by a large swarm of micro-scale particles (''agents'') and a particular target…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are increasingly being used to deliver goods from vendors to customers. To safely conduct these operations at scale, drones are required to broadcast position information as codified in remote…