1 s2.0 S0968090X2200314X Main

Transportation Research Part C 144 (2022) 103901
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Transportation Research Part C

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/trc
Truck–drone hybrid routing problem with time-dependent road

travel time
Yong Wang a, Zheng Wang b, *, Xiangpei Hu c, Guiqin Xue b, Xiangyang Guan d
a
School of Economics and Management, Chongqing Jiaotong University, Chongqing 400074, China
b
School of Maritime Economics and Management, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, Liaoning 116026, China
c
School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, Liaoning 116024, China
d
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T
Keywords: Combining trucks and drones in package delivery provides a promising venue for a future logistics
Truck–drone hybrid routing problem system that is more efficient and sustainable than the existing one. However, how to coordinate
Time-dependent travel time trucks and drones, particularly under uncertain traffic conditions (thus, travel time), remains a
Road network
critical question in this field. To address this challenge, this study proposes and solves a
Iterative local search
truck–drone hybrid routing problem with time-dependent road travel time (TDHRP-TDRTT) to
Uncertain traffic conditions
address the truck–drone cooperation issue. TDHRP-TDRTT is formulated as a cost minimization
problem with constraints associated with logistics demand and supply. An iterative local search
heuristic algorithm based on intra-pair and inter-pair customer exchanges and link re-
optimization is developed to solve TDHRP-TDRTT. Our results on small-scale and benchmark
instances show that the proposed algorithm has better computational performance than CPLEX
solver, the adaptive large neighborhood search, hybrid genetic-sweep algorithm, and variable
neighborhood search. A case study using traffic data from Chongqing, China shows that the
truck–drone solution improves the timeliness of delivery, undertakes sensitivity analysis
considering four road congestion states, significantly reduces trucking mileage, and facilitates
overcoming terrain limitations. Therefore, the proposed model and algorithm are of practical
significance in reducing operating cost, improving transportation efficiency, and facilitating a
smart and sustainable urban logistics distribution system.
1. Introduction
The logistics industry urgently needs to keep pace with rapidly evolving demand and supply conditions. On the one hand, urban
congestions pose tremendous challenges to emerging on-demand logistics services. When customer demands occur during peak
commuting hours, meeting these demands through trucking presents difficulties and uncertainties in on-time delivery. This case is
evident in the logistics services that have a strict timeliness requirement, such as the transport of medical materials (e.g., human
organs/blood). On the other hand, cities are rushing to adopt truck traffic restriction policies to protect urban mobility and the
environment, thereby limiting the coordination of logistics operations. Accordingly, meeting customer demands in a timely manner
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: yongwx@cqjtu.edu.cn (Y. Wang), drwz@dlut.edu.cn (Z. Wang), drhxp@dlut.edu.cn (X. Hu), xuegq@dlmu.edu.cn (G. Xue),
guanxy@uw.edu (X. Guan).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2022.103901
Received 3 April 2022; Received in revised form 7 July 2022; Accepted 19 September 2022
Available online 27 September 2022
0968-090X/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Y. Wang et al. Transportation Research Part C 144 (2022) 103901
under limited urban logistics resources has become a key issue in urban logistics. However, existing research has overlooked the fact
that strict delivery deadlines and heavy traffic congestion can adversely affect the smooth and timely operation of designed logistics
transportation systems. Transportation systems can encounter tactical failures and customer service delays, thereby impairing the
synergy and efficiency of urban logistics networks.
Drones have become a promising tool to address this issue. The use of drones for package delivery has two advantages. First, drones
do not rely on transportation infrastructures; thus, drones are resistant to disruptions in the transportation system. Second, drones are
reliable and have a high travel speed that can reach 108–128 km/h (Heath, 2015). These technical advantages and the broad market
prospect of drone usage have motivated various companies, such as Amazon, Google, JD, DHL, and other logistics giants, to use drones
in their distribution systems (Hern, 2014). Drones have also been utilized in transporting special cargos, such as blood, with high
delivery efficiency and low blood quality loss (Amukele et al., 2017) and meals with considerable flexibility (Liu, 2019).
However, the drone-only mode has limitations. First, drones have short cruising ranges. That is, the majority of commercial drones
can fly 10–30 km with one battery charge (Shavarani et al., 2018; Kim et al., 2019). In a large city, such as Chongqing (which is our
case study area), many customers are beyond this distance range from the nearest logistics depot, thereby making them inaccessible by
drones taking off from such a depot. Second, drones have a limited cargo capacity. This limitation affects the type and amount of cargo
a drone can carry and the number of customers each drone can serve within a given time window. Consequently, logistics companies
have to maintain a large fleet of drones and the associated staff, which is not cost-effective. Third, flying restrictions limit the use of
drones. In Washington, D.C. and other cities no-fly zones make many areas inaccessible by drones. In New York and other similar cities,
the dense high-rise buildings cause maneuvering challenges for drones. In consideration of these limitations, coordinated cargo dis
tribution involving drones and trucks is expected to become a common urban logistics distribution style in the future (Carlsson and
Song, 2018).
This study focuses on the truck–drone coordinated routing problem in consideration of road traffic conditions, which we call the
truck–drone hybrid routing problem with time-dependent road travel time drones (TDHRP-TDRTT). The term “hybrid” refers to the
combination of trucks and drones. In TDHRP-TDRTT, trucks (each equipped with one drone) leave a depot to deliver the requested
goods to customers within specified time windows before returning to the depot. The optimization goal of TDHRP-TDRTT is to
minimize the total distribution cost, including trucks and drones’ fixed costs, and their respective costs for delivery to customers. The
total cost in our TDHRP-TDRTT varies owing to the time-dependent road traffic conditions. The collaboration between trucks and
drones is a complex problem, particularly in a multi-drone and multi-truck cooperative distribution network (Ham, 2018). Critical
issues in an effective truck–drone cooperation include the selection of takeoff and landing locations for drones and the synchronization
of drone and truck operations. In this study, TDHRP-TDRTT investigates a one-to-one coordination scenario, in which each truck is
paired with one drone (Bouman et al., 2018), to assist urban logistics providers utilizing drones’ flexibility in accordance with
changing and time-dependent transportation network conditions. This “high cohesion, low coupling” collaborative scheduling avoids
mutual interference among distribution routes and enhances the robustness of the coordinated truck–drone distribution system with
time-dependent road networks.
The remainder of this study is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the related studies. Section 3 introduces the TDHRP-TDRTT
and constructs its mathematical model. Section 4 proposes an iterative local search heuristic algorithm based on intra-pair and inter-
pair customer exchanges and link re-optimization. Section 5 presents the computational experiments to test the performance of the
model and algorithm. Section 6 conducts a sensitivity analysis and reveals the related management insights. Section 7 summarizes the
conclusions and future directions.
2. Literature review
Technological advances in unmanned drones have enabled an effective truck–drone hybrid mode to transport products from depots
to customers, thereby leading to the increased efficiency of urban logistics distribution networks (Boysen et al., 2018; Zhen et al., 2020;
Zhang et al., 2021; Zeng et al., 2022). The truck–drone hybrid mode has been used in the industry as a promising practice to reduce
logistics costs and promote customer satisfaction (Gonzalez-R et al., 2020; Moshref-Javadi et al., 2021; Yan et al., 2022). TDHRP-
TDRTT integrates various transportation modes in time-dependent road networks. This integration provides the opportunity for lo
gistics enterprises to improve their profitability and market competitiveness (Ngowi, 2016). In consideration of the technical ad
vantages and broad application of truck–drone hybrid distribution mechanisms in dealing with complex and time-dependent traffic
networks, we review the research related to TDHRP-TDRTT to highlight the limitations of existing optimization approaches and
establish the contributions of our TDHRP-TDRTT.
TDHRP-TDRTT accounts for dynamic travel time and is an extension of the time-dependent vehicle routing problem (TDVRP)
(Gendreau et al., 2015; Xiao and Konak, 2016; Wang et al., 2019), which relaxes the constant speed assumption in conventional VRP
families. Donati et al. (2008) developed a solution algorithm by discretizing time–space and conducting time-dependent local search
over feasible moves within each time step. Their method has been proven to find an optimal route for every user. Generally, several
uncertain traffic conditions and external effects should be accounted for in TDVRP, such as vehicle routing problems on the basis of
time-dependent travel time (Kuo et al., 2009), vehicle routing problem involving fixed and time-varying route costs (Liu, 2013; Xu
et al., 2019; Zhou and Roncoli, 2022), real-time communication approach for dynamically updating the routes of distribution vehicles
(Zhu et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2020), a flexible path selection strategy under different traffic conditions (Huang et al., 2017), time-
dependent transportation network optimization with dynamic traffic information (Zhu and Hu, 2019), time-dependent minimum-
cost paths by calculating the upper and lower limits of travel time in congested traffic networks (Heni et al., 2019), and first-in-first-out
(FIFO) link travel time functions (Carey et al., 2014; Cheng et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2022). These previous studies inspired us to
2
introduce traffic information into the time-dependent truck–drone distribution operation to improve delivery timeliness. The goal of
our proposed TDHRP-TDRTT is to determine the optimal sequence in which customers are served by trucks and drones. The studies
have also focused on the TDVRP with time windows (TDVRPTW) (Dabia et al., 2013; Neves-Moreira et al., 2018; Hoogeboom and
Dullaert, 2019).
Seamless cooperation between trucks and drones is fundamental to TDHRP-TDRTT. The existing research has considered the
cooperation among homogeneous vehicles, such as the truck-and-trailer routing problem (TTRP) (Derigs et al., 2013; Krebs and
Ehmke, 2021); and the cooperation among heterogeneous vehicles, such as the traveling salesman problem with drones (TSPD) (Agatz
et al., 2018; Kitjacharoenchai et al., 2019) and the vehicle routing problem with drones (VRPD) (Wang et al., 2017a; Wang and Sheu,
2019; Schermer et al, 2019; Nguyen et al., 2022). TTRP uses a truck–trailer pair to perform a delivery task. That is, the truck and trailer
are separable, but no route can be served by a truck or trailer only (Gerdessen, 1996). Ak et al. (2007) and Lei et al. (2012) analyzed the
application potential of synergistic truck pairs to reduce transportation costs. In addition, a dynamic and severely constrained TTRP
was studied and accounted for the time window constraints of heterogeneous vehicle fleets and multiple types of tasks (Regnier-
Coudert et al., 2016; Aziez et al., 2022), and a TTRP with a time window constraint was developed by integrating branch pricing and
adaptive neighborhood search algorithms (Parragh and Cordeau, 2017). Their proposed “constructive solver” can effectively reduce
the fleet size and increase the number of delivery tasks handled by a company. Thus, finding a delivery path for a truck–trailer pair in a
realistic setting is feasible (Lin et al., 2011). Our problem is different from the truck-trailer routing problem in that a customer in truck-
trailer routing problem may be served by either a truck or a truck-trailer pair but not a trailer itself. In our problem, both truck and
drone can serve customers independently and drones can avoid the congestion of road network.
The integrated truck–drone option offers a more competitive logistics mode than TTRP under time-dependent traffic conditions
because drones are unaffected by dynamic ground traffic (Wang et al., 2019; Batista et al., 2021). Related research includes TSP with a
drone station, TSPD and VRPD schemes, such as truck–drone coordination can effectively overcome the cruise radius constraint of
drones and minimize the total travel time (Wang et al., 2017a; Kim and Moon, 2019), TSPD can significantly reduce distribution costs
compared with truck-only distribution at different scales (Agatz et al., 2018; Cavani et al., 2021), and VRPD can generate a high-
quality cooperated delivery solution (Wang et al., 2018; Li et al., 2020). Their results showed that TSPD and VRPD can signifi
cantly reduce distribution costs compared with truck-only distribution at different scales. From a practical perspective, Poikonen et al.
(2017) introduced Amdahl’s law to develop a more practical version of VRPD than the existing one, and obtained a significant cost
reduction with the truck–drone hybrid delivery strategy compared with that achieved by the truck-only technique. The effect of parcel
weight on drone energy consumption and restricted flying areas is considered in a truck–drone hybrid delivery system (Jeong et al.,
2019), and a two-echelon routing problem with drones is studied in last mile delivery (Kitjacharoenchai et al., 2020). Their solution
improved the timeliness of delivery compared with the truck-only mode.
Studies have developed effective approaches, either exact algorithms (e.g., continuous approximation paradigm) (Carlsson and
Song, 2018; Tamke and Buscher, 2021), deep reinforcement learning (Zhang et al., 2020; Qin et al., 2021; Wu et al., 2021; Alqahtani
and Hu, 2022; Basso et al., 2022; Qiu et al., 2022), or heuristics (e.g., simulated annealing and insertion heuristics) (Dorling et al.,
2017; Kitjacharoenchai et al., 2019; Ruiz et al., 2019), to address the computational complexity of VRPD and its variants. Bouman et al.
(2018) proposed a dynamic programming approach to reduce the hybrid routing cost of TSPD compared with that of the truck-only
mode. Wang and Sheu (2019) proposed a branch and price algorithm to solve VRPD and obtained high-quality solutions in small-scale
instances. They also discussed approximate solution algorithms with high computation efficiency. For solution search and drone flight
ranges, a parallel drone scheduling TSP heuristic was presented to study the tradeoffs between the high speed and range limitations of
drones (Murray and Chu, 2015), a variable local search algorithm was designed to generate TSPD routing solutions (Freitas and Penna,
2018), a heuristic algorithm was proposed to yield coordinated delivery paths for trucks and drones (Schermer et al., 2019), and a
three-phase heuristic solution algorithm to study parcel delivery using a truck with multiple drones (Murray and Raj, 2020). Inspired
by this previous research, the current study proposes an ILS heuristic to solve our TDHRP-TDRTT.
Although the aforementioned studies have examined many aspects of TDHRP-TDRTT, they have several limitations. (1) The ad
vantages of drones are not thoroughly exploited in TDVRP and TDVRPTW. Previous studies have optimized the routes for trucks and
viewed drones as trucks’ subordinates that travel together with trucks. However, how drones’ operation can be optimized on the basis
of trucks’ travel time has not been sufficiently studied. (2) The effects of traffic congestion on coordinated truck–drone operation have
not been fully accounted for. (3) The joint optimization of truck and drone routes can be affected by the time-dependent travel time,
but the interdependence between truck and drone routes has been insufficiently addressed in existing problem settings and solution
algorithms. Truck and drone routes must be coupled and sought simultaneously in the solution algorithm to achieve synergy between
trucks and drones. (4) Several studies on VRPD or TSPD have determined the advantages of trucks and drones in congestion avoidance
but have paid limited attention to the detailed analysis of time-dependent road travel time.
Compared with previous studies, the current study presents the following theoretical and practical contributions. (1) A truck–drone
cooperation mode in time-dependent traffic networks is proposed to improve the capability of logistics distribution systems to satisfy
customers’ demands of timely delivery. (2) The problem is featured by introducing drones for air deliveries and considering how they
interact with the changing traffic on the ground. We formulate the problem by integrating the time-dependent travel time that will
make assignments, schedules, and coordination of vehicles completely different from the classic vehicle routing problems. (3) An
iterative local search (ILS) solution algorithm involving five local search operators on two levels (i.e., inter-routing and intra-routing
levels) is developed for TDHRP-TDRTT. (4) A case study of truck–drone coordinated operations for Chongqing, China is designed to
validate the formulation of TDHRP-TDRTT and the proposed solution algorithm. The simulation results show that truck-drone routing
mode plays an important role in avoiding ground traffic congestion and ensuring on-time delivery.
3
Fig. 1. Time-dependent traffic condition variation in Chongqing, China.
3. Problem statement and mathematical model
3.1. Problem statement
TDHRP-TDRTT can be defined on a directed graph G = (N,A), where N is the set of customer nodes, and A is the set of arcs linking
the nodes in N and the depot. A fleet of homogeneous trucks are initially located at the depot, ready for delivering parcels to customers.
Each truck is paired with a drone that can fly from truck to serve a customer independently as long as the customer is located within its
flying range R and the weight of the customer’s parcel satisfies the capacity of the drone. Before a drone flies from its paired truck for
delivery, its battery is replaced with a new one and the corresponding customer parcel is loaded. After a drone delivers a parcel to a
customer, it needs to land at a node to meet with its paired truck. Each customer for i ∈ N must be served exactly once during a hard
time window [ai , bi ] by either a truck or a drone. Let qi (i ∈ N) be the weight of the parcel demanded by customer i, which is less than a
truck capacity QT but may be greater than a drone capacity Qd . A truck needs to leave the depot with parcels for the customers served
by itself and its paired drone. Furthermore, the total weight of parcels of all the customers served by each pair must not exceed Qt . The
objective of TDHRP-TDRTT is to minimize the total logistics cost that consists of the fixed cost of employing truck–drone pairs, and
their travel cost.
TDHRP-TDRTT has the following assumptions.
• A drone can be launched from and retrieved at any customer node.

• A drone can only be launched and retrieved by its paired truck.
• A drone can serve only one customer at every flight.
• Truck and drone have to wait for each other if any of them arrives at a node earlier.
• The fluid queue model with quadratic arrival rates proposed by Newell (1982) is extended to represent time-dependent travel times
at link and path levels.
• Once a pair of vehicles (i.e., trucks and drones) arrive at a node, they can leave for next node immediately and the time of retrieving
a drone at a truck is ignored.
• If a drone is released from a truck, it can be self-directed by an automated navigation system installed on it.
• A truck can carry at most one drone. That is, there may be drones not used in a delivery solution.
The travel time of a truck in TDHRP-TDRTT considered to be time-dependent due to real-world traffic conditions. Fig. 1 illustrates
the traffic condition variations of the roads in Chongqing, a large city in China, at four different time points. The congestion of the main
road from west to east gradually intensifies from 7:00 to 8:00 and is alleviated at 10:00. Affected by the main road, the nearby roads
show different degrees of congestion. Accordingly, the travel time of a truck through the road changes with time. As a result, the travel
time of a truck does not follow the triangle inequality, but the property of FIFO is satisfied (Cheng et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2022).
Without loss of generality, each congested road link of logistics networks can be modeled as a single queueing system with a constant
service rate. We assume that t0 and t3 express the start time and end time of congestion period, respectively. The link travel time profile
derives from the fluid queueing model and a graphical illustration of queue evolution of a road link introduced by Newell (1982) can be
introduced in Appendix A. Let LTTl(t) and PTTρ(t) be the travel time function of time-dependent link l and the travel time function time-
dependent path ρ, respectively. Two properties are presented that LTTl(t) and PTTρ(t) satisfy the FIFO property.
4
(a) only truck dispatching scheme with traffic jam (TDVRP) (b) truck-drone dispatching scheme with traffic jam (TDHRP-TDRTT)
Truck arc Drone customer Truck customer Depot
Fig. 2. Illustration of TDHRP-TDRTT optimization.
Property 1. When the departure time t is within the time period of interest [t0, t3], the time-dependent link travel time function LTTl(t)
satisfies the FIFO property.
∑L
Property 2. When the time-dependent path travel time function can be expressed asPTTρ (t) = l=1 LTTl (t),l ∈ {1,2,⋯,L}, where L is the
total number of links in path ρ, the time-dependent path travel time function PTTρ(t) satisfies the FIFO property.
The proof that Properties 1 and 2 satisfy the FIFO property can refer to Lu et al. (2022).
We assume that the depot working time is [a0 ,b0 ], the congestion period is [t0, t3], t0 ≤ a0＜b0 ≤ t3. The congestion period is split into
multiple time slots with a same duration. In addition, the time-dependent travel time of link l during congestion periods can be ob
tained from Appendix A as follows:LTTl (t) = w(t) + FTl = δ
3μ ⋅ (t − t0 )2 (t3 − t) + FTl ,l ∈ {1, 2, ⋯, L}, where w(t) denotes the time-
dependent delay departing at time t, δ is the shape parameter used in polynomial form, μ expresses the departure rate, and FTl is
the free-flow travel time of link l. Since δ can be expresses as δ = 64C ⋅ L⋅f
vco (Zhou et al., 2022), where C denotes the lane-based ultimate
e
road capacity, L is the link length, fe is the constant in elasticity function for mapping congestion duration to the magnitude of speed
reduction, and vco denotes the cut-off speed. A default value of undersaturated links can be expressed as ultimate road capacity C. The
mij
time-dependent travel time function LTTij(t) can be written as LTTij (t) = 64
3 ⋅ mij ⋅ αtij ⋅ (t − t0 )2 (t3 − t) + vTij , (i, j)⊂ l, where the
parameter αtij describes the congestion ratio of arc (i, j, t), and the resulting polynomial function can be approximated by a set of
piecewise linear functions between t0 and t3, in order to be consistent with other existing experimental data. Moreover, mij is the
Manhattan distance from node i to j traveled by a truck, and vTij denotes the maximum speed of trucks from node i to j.
Due to the ground congestion, the triangle inequalities do not always hold for trucks. In a time-dependent road network, the travel
time of a truck depends on the moment it enters the arc and can be obtained by tools like electronic navigation map. Instead of
considering the changing speed of a truck passing through a link, the problem in this study emphasizes that the delay time a truck
enters a same link during different times are different. This is a common way of handling time-dependent vehicle routing problems in
the literature (Newell, 1982; Malandraki and Daskin, 1992; Cheng et al., 2022). This study needs to select a set of arcs for trucks to
travel according to time-dependent travel times and the cooperation between trucks and drones. In addition, this study needs to
consider time-dependent travel times, customers’ time windows, and the cooperation between trucks and drones.
A solution to TDHRP-TDRTT may use drones that are not subject to ground traffic for delivery to cope with the time-dependent
travel time. Such a solution is conducive to obtaining a more efficient and practical solution than that to the traditional delivery
problem without drones. Fig. 2 shows a comparison of two solutions to the vehicle routing problem in a time-dependent traffic network
(TDVRP) without and with drones. Without drones, several congested arcs have to be traveled by trucks in Fig. 2(a). On the contrary,
the solution shown in Fig. 2(b) avoids traveling these congested arcs by using drones to deliver to related customers. The total logistics
cost can be remarkably reduced with such truck–drone coordination. However, the solution to TDHRP-TDRTT cannot be obtained by
simply changing the best-found TDVRP solution into a solution in which drones are scheduled to serve customers that are affected by
congested traffic. With the participation of drones, the delivery tasks may be reassigned and the routing schedule may completely
differ from the schedule of TDVRP. What customers need to be served by trucks and drones respectively, what routes need to be
traveled by trucks, and where drones should take off and land to achieve a cost-effective truck–drone coordinated routing scheme are
important issues faced by logistics companies that are launching or going to launch a drone delivery project.
3.2. Mathematical model
TDHRP-TDRTT realizes urban logistics distribution by using drones for delivery and making them coordinate with trucks. Such an
5
Table 1
Notations and definitions in TDHRP-TDRTT.
Parameter Description
N Set of all customer nodes.

P Set of all truck–drone pairs available for delivery.
N−d Set of nodes that cannot be serviced by drone.
R Flying range of a drone.
S Set of all time slots, t ∈ S.
A Set of arcs, (i, j, t) ∈ A, i, j ∈ N ∪ {0}, t ∈ S, and 0 denotes the depot.
B Set of nodes for drone launch and retrieve.
NN Number of customer nodes.
Cp Fixed cost of a truck–drone pair employed for delivery. This cost is associated with driver’s wage, vehicle maintenance cost, etc.
CT General cost for a truck to travel a unit distance.
Cd Cost for a drone to travel a unit distance.
cgijt Congestion cost per unit distance of arc (i, j, t).
Cc The coordination cost at any truck–drone rendezvous node includes loading/unloading the drone, swapping batteries.
si The service time of drone or truck at node i. The service time includes the truck-drone coordination, such as loading a drone, swapping batteries,
service time, and so on.
vd The drone velocity.
vTij The maximum speed of trucks from node i to j.
αtij Congestion ratio of arc (i, j, t).
eij Euclidean distance from node i to j traveled by a drone.
cttij The time-dependent travel time of arc (i, j, t) traveled by a truck in time slot t, which contains the time-dependent delay and free-flow travel time.
[ai , bi ] The time window of customer i.
qi The demand of customer i.
τi The latest time when a truck or drone visits node i, i ∈ N.
QT , Qd The capacities of a truck and a drone, respectively.
Variables
ypijk Equals 1 if the drone in the pair p ∈ P flies from its paired truck at node i ∈ N, serves the customer node j(∈ N,j ∕
= i), and rendezvous with its paired
truck at node k (∈ N, k ∕
= j, k ∕
= i); and 0 otherwise.
xtpij Equals 1 if the truck of pair p uses arc (i, j, t), otherwise, its value is 0.
approach is useful for coping with congested traffic conditions and improving the efficiency of delivering customer parcels. However,
drone delivery also leads to the increasing complexity of the problem formulation because TDHRP-TDRTT expands VRP with time-
dependent travel time and VRP with drones. The drone flights in the sky and the truck routes on the ground with time-dependent
travel times cannot be scheduled separately, and they must agree with each other.
We design a specific set of variables for determining and matching the schedules of the two types of vehicles. Then, based on the
variable set, we construct a mathematical model. Table 1 shows the parameters and variables used in formulating TDHRP-TDRTT. In
addition, the objective function shown in Eq. (1) expresses the minimization of the total cost, including the fixed cost and coordination
cost of truck–drone pairs, the delivery cost of drones, and the time-dependent delivery cost of trucks.
( ( ) )
∑ ∑∑ ∑∑∑ ( ( ) ) ∑∑( )
min Cp t
xp0i + ypijk eij + ejk Cd + Cc + t
CT + cgijt mij xpij (1)
p∈P t∈S i∈N i∈N j∈N k∈N t∈S (i,j,t)∈A
s.t.
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
xtpij qj + ypijk qj ⩽QT , ∀p ∈ P (2)
t∈S i∈N∪{0} j∈N i∈N j∈N\N − k∈N
d
∑∑ ∑ ∑∑∑
xtpij + ypijk = 1, ∀j ∈ N\Nd− (3)
t∈S p∈P i∈N∪{0} p∈P i∈N k∈N
∑∑ ∑
xtpij = 1, ∀j ∈ Nd− (4)
t∈S p∈P i∈N∪{0}
( )
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑∑
2 ypijk ⩽ xtphi + xtphk , ∀i, k ∈ N, ∀p ∈ P (5)
j∈N t∈S h∈N∪{0} t∈S h∈N
∑ ∑
t
xphi = t
xpjh ⩽1, ∀p ∈ P, h ∕
=0 (6)
(h,i,t)∈A (j,h,t)∈A
∑∑ ∑∑
xtp0i = t
xpj0 ⩽1, ∀p ∈ P (7)
t∈S i∈N t∈S j∈N
6
Start
Time-windows Preprocessing in Section 4.1
Generate truck-only routes by the classic greedy

Generate an heuristic using the time-dependent travel time in
initial solution Section 4.2
Modify the truck-only routes to truck–drone

cooperative routes using Strategies 1 and 2 in
Section 4.2
Set the current solution as the initial solution
Relocate a customer of a truck-drone route
Intra-pair Level Exchange two customers of a truck route

(Section 4.3.1)
Exchange two customers of routes of a truck-drone

Update the pair using Strategies 1 and 2
current
solution by
local search
Exchange truck nodes of in different truck-drone
Intra-pair Level pairs
(Section 4.3.2)
Exchange truck and drone nodes in different truck-

drone pairs and optimize by Strategies 1 and 2
Update the current solution if it is improved after

local search
No
Is termination condition satisfied?
Yes
Improve the current solution using 2-opt algorithm

in Section 4.4
End
Fig. 3. Flowchart of ILS for TDHRP-TDRTT.
7
( )
τj ⩾τi + si + ctijt + xpij
t
− 1 M, ∀p ∈ P, (i, j, t) ∈ A (8)
eij ( )
τj ⩾τi + si + + ypijk − 1 M, ∀p ∈ P, ∀i, k ∈ N, ∀j ∈ N\Nd− (9)
vd
ejk ( )
(10)
t ′
τk′ ⩾τj + sj + + ctkk ′ + ypijk + xtpkk′ − 2 M, ∀p ∈ P, ∀i ∈ N, ∀j ∈ N\Nd− , (k, k , t) ∈ A
vd
eij + ejk ⩽R, ∀i, k ∈ B, ∀j ∈ Nd− (11)
ai ⩽τi ⩽bi , ∀i ∈ N (12)
xtpij ∈ {0, 1}, ∀p ∈ P, (i, j, t) ∈ A (13)
ypijk ∈ {0, 1}, ∀p ∈ P, ∀i, k ∈ N, ∀j ∈ N\Nd− (14)
Constraint (2) guarantees that the capacity restrictions of each truck and drone cannot be violated respectively. Constraint (3)
ensures that each customer is visited exactly once by either a truck or a drone. Constraint (4) ensures that the nodes in N−d must be
serviced by trucks. Constraint (5) ensures that the takeoff and landing nodes of the drone must be visited by its paired truck. Constraint
(6) ensures that any truck must depart from a customer after it arrives at the customer. Constraint (7) ensures that any truck must start
from and return to the depot node 0 if it is employed. Constraints (8), (9), and (10) constrain the visiting time at a node, where M is a
large value. Constraint (11) guarantees the maximum flight distance limitation of drones. Constraint (12) guarantees the time windows
for each customer are met. And the ranges of decision variables are constrained by Constraints (13) and (14).
It is worth mentioning that not all the pairs in P need to be employed for delivery. If a truck–drone pair p(∈ P) is not employed,
∑ t
∑ t
(0,i,t)∈A xp0i = 0 and the corresponding fixed cost will not be added to the total cost in (1). Otherwise, (0,i,t)∈A xp0i must be equal to 1.
∑ t
This is because if (0,i,t)∈A xp0i = 0, but pair p is employed, there would be a sub-tour that does not visit the depot. But such a sub-tour
cannot exist at all due to the visiting time continuity of a truck route ensured by Constraints (8) ~ (10). Moreover, due to the drone
operations, if t ∈ S, xtpij may not be 1 for some p and j.
Constraints (8), (9), and (10) ensure feasible visiting times at customers. Constraint (8) ensures customer j is visited not earlier than
the time that a truck arrives at j if it travels arc (i, j, t) at time slot t. Constraint (9) guarantees customer j is visited not earlier than the
time that a drone arrives at j if it flies from i through j and finally to k. Constraint (10) guarantees a feasible visiting time at k if a truck
′
first waits at k for its paired drone that has the itinerary of “i-j-k”, and then takes the drone from k to k . In such a situation, the visiting
′
time at k should not be earlier than the arrival time of the drone with the itinerary of i-j-k-k . Thus, the feasibility of the visiting time at
′ ′
customer k is guaranteed by Constraint (10) if the truck waits for the drone at k. Furthermore, to illustrate how Constraint (10) works,
′
we assume that a truck–drone pair serves four nodes (i, j, k, k ). If this path is established, then xtpkk′ = 1, ypijk = 1. It means that if the
′
truck travels from k to k at time slot t, and the drone flies from i to j and to k, then the arrival time when the truck arrives at node k is
′ ′
t
not less than tj + ejk /vd + tkk′ . Otherwise, constraint (10) does not work.
4. Iterated local search heuristic
As an extension of two NP-hard problems, TDVRP and VRPD (Schermer et al., 2019; Wang and Sheu, 2019), TDHRP-TDRTT is also
an NP-hard problem. A valid solution to the problem should comprehensively account for truck and drone operations. This task can be
fulfilled by optimizing the routes and schedules to ensure that all customers are served within desired time windows and at the
minimum cost for logistics managers. That is, TDHRP-TDRTT assigns customers to trucks and their paired drones in accordance with
time-dependent traffic conditions and the drone tabu list Nd* . Its initial value is Nd− ⫅N*d . The filling process of tabu list can be shown as
follows: 1) calculate eij and ejk 2) if eij + ejk > R, add {i, j, k} as a sequence to tabu list Nd* , 3) repeat steps 1) and 2) until all triples of
nodes are considered.
To this end, we design an ILS heuristic by considering TDHRP-TDRTT constraints. The local search algorithm assigns each customer
to a truck and its paired drone under the influence of changing traffic conditions in a road network.
The proposed ILS includes three main modules: generation of initial truck–drone coordinated routes, local search, and 2-opt
optimization. The initial solution can be generated by a greedy heuristic using the time-dependent travel time (Cheng et al., 2022;
Zhou et al., 2022). An iterated local search algorithm is mainly used to obtain the optimized truck–drone routes in which the intra-pair
and inter-pair customer exchanges are adopted to improve the current solution. Furthermore, 2-opt algorithm is used for link re-
optimization and improving algorithm performance (Wang et al., 2013; Bruglieri et al., 2022). The algorithm procedure is shown
in Fig. 3.
4.1. Time window preprocessing
Before constructing the initial solution, ILS first preprocesses the time windows to detect infeasible arcs in the data. That is, for each
arc, if ai + cttij + si > bj ,(i,j,t) ∈ A, it is not feasible and must be deleted in the solution set. Additionally, by preprocessing all arcs, an
8
Table 2
Paired truck–drone route generation algorithm.
Input: Initial truck-only routes, and the drone tabu list
Output: Cooperative distribution solution involving both trucks and drones
1 Obtain the initial truck-only routes.
2 For each truck route ρ in the truck-only solution:
3 Set node i to the first customer node served by ρ.
4 Add all customer nodes except i in ρ, to set N(ρ), whereN(ρ) denotes the node set contained in path ρ.
5 If the length of the set N(ρ) is greater than or equal to 2:
6 Select j from set N(ρ).
7 If j is not in the drone tabu list:
8 Insert node j as a drone node on the basis of Strategy 1.
9 Select a node k from N(ρ) as a landing node of the drone on the basis of Strategy 2.
10 If the appropriate k value cannot be found according to Strategies 1 and 2:
11 Set node i to the next node j in route ρ, update the partial solution ρ , and skip to Line 3.
′
12 Remove j and k from N(ρ), and record the partial solution ρ .

′
13 If the node number in ρ − ρ′ is smaller than or equal to 2:

14 Insert the following nodes in ρ to the partial solution ρ .
′
15 Store the partial solution ρ as a complete truck-drone solution and skip to LINE 2.
′
16 Else: Set node i to k and the route ρ to ρ′ : ρ − ρ′ , and skip to the Line 3.
17 Return the feasible truck–drone coordinated solution.
initial feasible arc set can be constructed, which will serve as the basis for subsequent solution construction and update iterations.
In the optimization phase, since the speed of the truck is time-dependent, waiting at the node is necessary. For the arc (i, j) in any
path ρ, the earliest departure time of the truck is ai + si . Then, according to the time window [aj , bj ] of node j, it can be determined that
the feasible driving interval of the truck from i to j is [aj − ai − si , bj − ai − si ], and the corresponding time interval set is Zi = {zi1 , ⋯,
{ }
zis }⫅S. Therefore, the set of feasible travel times for vehicles from node i to j is Tij = ctijzi1 , ⋯, ct zijis . Moreover, ILS selects the shortest
t
time-dependent travel time ctijopt ∈ Tij , and the corresponding departure time is tiopt ∈ zisopt . Furthermore, the waiting time at node i is
tiopt − ai − si .
4.2. Method for generating Truck–Drone routes
We generate an initial feasible solution to TDHRP-TDRTT using the algorithm in Table 2, which adapts the traditional VRP
optimization mechanism to the special constraints in the proposed TDHRP-TDRTT model.
In Step 1, the initial solution is generated in parallel by adapting Balseiro’s method (Balseiro et al, 2011). The detailed process of
Step 1 can be shown as follows: 1) Initialize ψ empty truck–drone routes and corresponding feasible arc sets as initial solutions. 2) For
each route, set the depot as the first node of the current route, choose and insert the next customer from feasible arc sets, and then
calculate the waiting time and departure time according to Section 4.1. 3) Iteratively execute 2) to generate an initial solution that
meets all customer time window requirements.
Moreover, the algorithm in Table 2 applies Strategy 1 to select a node and assign the delivery task of the node to drone and Strategy
2 to select a node and make the drone land at the node. The two strategies are detailed as follows.
Strategy 1 – Saving-based method for selecting a drone node.
Explanation: This strategy is used in Step 6 in Table 2. Let AA(i) be a subset of N(ρ) given in Step 6, where N(ρ) denotes the node set
contained in path ρ. Customers in AA(i) are within the flight range of a drone if it flies from node i and have demands below the drone
( )
capacity. If node j ∈ AA(i) is served after node i by a truck, the travel cost from i to j at time slot t is CT + cgijt ⋅ mij . If node j is served
C e
by a drone that flies from node i, the travel cost from i to j is Cd eij . Subsequently, a cost ratio rj = C +cgd ij ⋅m can be calculated for any
( T ijt ) ij
( )
j ∈ AA(i) and we have cost ratio vector r1 , ⋯, rf for all nodes in AA(i), where f represents the number of nodes in AA(i). The node with
the minimum ratio in the vector has the maximum saving in travel cost if we assign a truck node to a drone. Therefore, we select a
drone node from AA(i) with the minimum ratio.
Notably, this study must consider whether there is an available drone node that can be used for cost savings. In this study, we first
go through a preprocessing step to remove the arcs that cannot be served by the drone. In other words, for each optional drone node,
there must be at least one landing node. This landing node may be expensive, but in the subsequent optimization steps, it will be
continuously improved. This study uses the saving algorithm to select the drone node in order to better utilize the advantages of the
drone to avoid congestion; and uses the greedy algorithm to select the drone landing node in order to prompt the drone to converge
with the truck as soon as possible after the node is served. Therefore, the choice of landing point k is not considered in Strategy 1.
Strategy 2 – Greedy method for selecting a landing node for drone.
Explanation: This strategy is used in Step 9 of Table 2. If a drone flies from node i, serves node j, then we select a landing node for
the drone from set B(j) and define a truck node set T(i, k) between i and k ∈ B(j). B(j) is a set given in Table 1 and it contains only the
customers who are within the flight range of a drone if it flies from node j. For node k ∈ B(j), the drone travel cost is Cd (eij + ejk ), and the
( )
truck travel cost is CT + cgijt ⋅ mij . Furthermore, the total travel cost of the truck–drone pair is Cd (eij + ejk ) + (CT + cgijt ) ⋅ mij , where
9
The pair before local

0 1 2 3 5 6 7 0
search operation
4 8
The pair after shifting a 0 1 3 5 6 2 7 0

single node
4 8
The pair after exchanging

two customer nodes served 0 1 6 3 5 2 7 0
by trucks
4 8
The pair after

exchanging customer
0 1 8 3 5 6 7 0
nodes served by the
truck and drone
4 2
Customer node Customer node Drone arc Truck arc

Depot
without changes with changes
Fig. 4. Local search at the intra-pair level.
the drone uses the Euclidean distance, which is eij , and the truck uses the Manhattan distance. It should be noted that this study
considers ground congestion, thus the triangle inequalities do not always hold for trucks. Moreover, we choose the node k ∈ B(j) with
the minimum travel cost for the truck-drone pair as the landing node of the drone.
4.3. Iterated local search
Iterated Local Search (ILS) has been adopted as an effective strategy by several researchers to study time-dependent vehicle routing
problem in a logistics network (Brandão, 2020; Allahyari et al., 2021; Máximo and Nascimento, 2021). On the basis of the previous
work, an ILS is devised to find a good TDHRP-TDRTT solution in this subsection. Local search operators are divided into two types:
intra-pair and inter-pair levels. The intra-pair local search updates the solution by shifting or exchanging the customers in the same
pair, whereas the inter-pair search is related to an additional reference solution. As road congestion changes with time, truck travel
times are different on different or same links. In addition, since customers have the characteristics of fixed service time windows, the
number of customers served by drones will change during the iteration after the generation of an initial solution. All local search
operators are executed to update and obtain the best-found solution.
4.3.1. Local search at the Intra-pair level

Intra-pair local search operator aims to improve the routes of a truck–drone pair, and is shown in Fig. 4. The circle represents a
depot, the shaded squares denote customer nodes with changes, and the unshaded ones are customer nodes without changes. The
dashed arcs correspond to drone arcs, and the solid arcs correspond to truck arcs.
(1) Single node shifting operator: A node is randomly selected and moved to another position in the routing sequence. In Fig. 4,
truck node 2 in the original pair is selected and shifted to the position between nodes 6 and 7 in the pair after single node shifting
operation.
(2) Exchanging customers served by truck: Two truck nodes are randomly selected to exchange their positions in the routing
sequence. In Fig. 4, truck nodes 6 and 2 in the original pair are selected and exchanged to obtain the updated pair.
(3) Exchanging customers served by the truck and drone: A selected truck node not in the tabu list Nd* will be served by a drone, and
a selected drone node will be served by a truck. In Fig. 4, truck node 8 and drone node 2 in the original pair are selected and exchanged
to obtain the updated pair.
The preliminary experiments demonstrate that these operators are promising for improving the routes of an inefficient truck–drone
10
Parent Pair 1 0 1 2 3 5 6 7 0
4 8
Parent Pair 2
0 9 13 11 15 12 14 0
16 10
Child Pair 1 0 1 12 3 5 13 7 0
4 8
0 9 6 11 15 2 14 0
Child Pair 2
16 10
Customer node Customer node

Depot Drone arc Truck arc
without changes with changes
Fig. 5. Local search at the truck–drone inter-pair level.
pair. One of the reasons is the varying travel time and inappropriate delivery assignments between trucks and drones.
4.3.2. Local search at the inter-pair level

We design an inter-pair exchange operator to optimize the search process in the solution space. For increasing the diversity of the
solution. This operator (Fig. 5) randomly selects two truck–drone pairs as parent pairs and two customer nodes in each pair, exchanges
the four selected customer nodes between the two pairs, and updates the solution space by using the two child pairs.
As shown in Fig. 5, nodes 2 and 6 in parent pair 1 and nodes 13 and 12 in parent pair 2 are selected, and the child pairs (1 and 2) are
generated by exchanging corresponding nodes. This may generate the infeasible solutions by the truck–drone inter-pair operator,
which will be handled according to the strategy proposed in the last paragraph of this section.
As shown in Fig. 6, the drone node 4 of path 1 and the truck node 2 of path 2 are selected, and the operator first exchanges the two
nodes. Then, Strategies 1 and 2 are used to make partial adjustments to the exchanged paths to obtain Child pairs.
All four local search operators are executed individually. In each execution process, if an infeasible solution is generated, then the
solution should be adjusted in accordance with the following situations. (1) If the drone mileage constraint is exceeded and the takeoff
position of the drone is fixed, then Strategy 2 will be used to select a new landing node for drone. (2) If the capacity of the truck is
exceeded, then the customer will be assigned to a truck–drone pair with a real load rate below average. A drone’s maximum flight
range is within the available range of drone battery endurance. Moreover, the tabu list is used to store and update infeasible customers
for each truck–drone pair to avoid serving customers beyond the battery endurance of drone.
4.4. 2-opt algorithm
If the new local solutions are better than the existing best-found solution, then the best-found solution will be updated; otherwise,
the local search continues. If the best-found solution remains unchanged after a given number of iterations, then the algorithm will be
terminated.
2-opt algorithm is used to eliminate poor connections in the cooperative routes and improve the TDHRP-TDRTT solutions. An
enumeration policy is proposed to find such poor links and re-optimize them with the shortest path algorithm (Flood, 1956; Croes,
1958; Lin, 1965; Chen et al., 2020). Its scale is C4N , where N is the number of truck customers in the current truck–drone solution. The
re-optimization process uses the better links to replace the poor links in the current truck–drone routes. The link re-optimization
process is introduced to improve the capacity of global search where a successful global search can obtain a good direction for the
local optimal search results.
It is implemented through the following steps.
11
Parent Pair 1 0 1 2 3 5 6 7 0
4 8
Parent Pair 2 0 1 3 5 6 2 7 0
4 8
Child Pair 1 0 1 3 5 4 6 7 0
2 8
Child Pair 2 0 1 3 5 6 4 7 0
2 8
Customer Node operated Drone arc Truck arc

depot
node by operater
Fig. 6. Local search between truck and drone nodes at the inter-pair level.
a b a b
f f
o c o c
e e
d d
(a) Solution before irrational link (b) Solution after irrational link
re-optimization re-optimization
Depot Customer node Drone arc Truck arc
Fig. 7. Illustration of the 2-opt algorithm.
Step 1: Randomly select a truck–drone route from the solution.

Step 2: Select four different truck nodes with an enumeration policy, on this truck–drone pair route. Exchange them and generate a
new pair route.
Step 3: Repeat Step 2 for all pairs of nodes on this route.
Step 4: Find the best route among all new routes generated in Step 3. Replace the original route in the solution with the new best
route.
Step 5: Repeat steps 1–4 for all truck–drone routes in the original solution.
12
Table 3
Comparison of the different instances with their solutions.
No Scale αtij CPLEX ILS Average Gap (%)
Best Cost Time Limit(s) Optimal Best Cost Time Gap compared with CPLEX
Gap (%) (s)
1 10 [1.0,1.1) 66.75 1800 0.00 % 66.75 18 0.00 % 0.26 %

2 10 [1.0,1.1) 69.12 1800 0.00 % 69.12 17 0.00 % 0.12 %
3 10 [1.0,1.1) 71.86 1800 0.00 % 72.16 18 0.42 % 0.47 %
4 10 [1.0,1.1) 73.79 1800 0.00 % 73.79 17 0.00 % 0.03 %
5 10 [1.0,1.1) 74.17 1800 0.00 % 74.22 18 0.07 % 0.27 %
6 10 [1.1,1.3) 75.89 1800 0.00 % 75.89 17 0.00 % 0.14 %
7 10 [1.1,1.3) 79.54 1800 0.00 % 79.94 16 0.51 % 0.59 %
8 10 [1.1,1.3) 76.45 1800 0.00 % 76.45 19 0.00 % 0.36 %
9 10 [1.1,1.3) 80.07 1800 0.00 % 80.26 16 0.24 % 0.34 %
10 10 [1.1,1.3) 79.56 1800 0.00 % 79.56 16 0.00 % 0.18 %
11 20 [1.0,1.1) 177.61 3600 1.04 % 176.18 33 − 0.81 % − 0.91 %
12 20 [1.0,1.1) 184.47 3600 0.00 % 184.47 39 0.00 % 0.76 %
13 20 [1.0,1.1) 180.91 3600 0.00 % 181.22 37 0.17 % 0.33 %
14 20 [1.0,1.1) 175.19 3600 0.53 % 175.06 43 − 0.07 % 0.55 %
15 20 [1.0,1.1) 175.39 3600 0.00 % 175.39 32 0.00 % 0.24 %
16 20 [1.1,1.3) 202.24 3600 2.00 % 198.47 31 − 1.86 % − 1.06 %
17 20 [1.1,1.3) 195.48 3600 0.37 % 195.94 40 0.24 % 0.31 %
18 20 [1.1,1.3) 190.05 3600 0.00 % 190.34 32 0.15 % 0.25 %
19 20 [1.1,1.3) 192.31 3600 0.55 % 191.73 30 − 0.30 % − 0.23 %
20 20 [1.1,1.3) 188.69 3600 0.00 % 189.03 31 0.18 % 0.27 %
In Fig. 7, the link from depot to node b and the link from node b to depot in the original solution are crossed. This solution is
evidently not good. If we assume that the travel costs of arcs (c, b, t) and (b, o, t) are lower than arcs (c, a, t) and (a, o, t), respectively, the
solution of Fig. 7(b) is better than Fig. 7(a). Therefore, it is re-optimized into a better solution without link crossing.
5. Computational experiments
5.1. Small-scale instances
In this subsection, two types of small-scale instances are employed to validate the correctness of the model and the performance of
our proposed ILS. We randomly generate 20 instances in which customers are located by a uniform distribution. They are solved by our
heuristic and a MIP solver of CPLEX 12.10 on a computer with an Intel(R) Core (TM) i7-9750H 2.59 GHz and 16 GB. The results are
shown in Table 3.
Our instances can be divided into two groups and are randomly generated in the range of 40 km × 40 km. Each of the first 10
instances includes 10 customers with different Euclidean distance matrices. Road networks are generated with different congestion
states through the parameter αtij . Customer demands and time windows are obtained from RC101 instance. The parameters Cp , CT , Cd ,
Cc , QT , Qd are 10, 0.5, 0.2, 0.1, 100, and 20. The speed of drone is 60 km/h, and the speed of truck is 50 km/h. The maximum flight
range of a drone is 10 km. In addition, we assume that the congestion cost per unit distance is 1.5 times of the congestion ratio. Each of
the last 10 instances has 20 customers with a similar truck–drone distribution task. The time limits for CPLEX are 1800 and 3600 s for
the first 10 instances and second 10 instances, respectively. The ILS algorithm is executed 20 times to obtain the best solutions for each
instance, and the maximum numbers of generations with 10 and 20 customer instances are set as 1000 and 1500, respectively. The
algorithm will be terminated when no further improvement can be found over the best-known solution with 15 consecutive iterations
in our proposed approach or over the maximum number of generations. Table 3 shows the instance setups and their solutions.
From Table 3, we can see that CPLEX has obtained the optimal solution for all computation instances with a scale of 10 within the
set 1800 s. However, for the case with a scale of 20, only 5 cases have obtained the optimal solution within 3600 s. In the case where the
optimal solution was not obtained, the maximum deviation reached 2 %. Generally, CPLEX provides optimal solutions for 15 of the 20
calculation examples. Therefore, for the instances in which CPLEX obtains the optimal solution, although our ILS did not obtain the
optimal solution in all 20 tests, the computation results are better than CPLEX, and the average gap of all the instances is less than 1 %.
Furthermore, the ILS completed the calculation of the scale of 10 within 20 s, and for the scale of 20, the algorithm proposed in this
study also completed the solution of all the cases in 45 s. Thus, our ILS algorithm has a considerably optimized time cost and nearly
best-found solution compared with CPLEX for large-scale problems, thereby validating its utility and feasibility in solving such
problems.
5.2. Algorithm Comparison and analysis
5.2.1. Parameter tuning based on benchmark instances

In this section, we first debug the relevant parameters of ILS to find the most suitable combination of parameters. Second, we adjust
max noim
the parameters of the maximum number of iterations Niter and the number of continuous invariant iterations of the solution Niter .
13
Table 4
max noim
Setting of parameters Niter and Niter .
NAME BKS Nmax
iter Nnoim
iter
Gap compared with BKS
10 15 20 25
R101-50 3339.93 500 3502.20 3468.80 3468.80 3468.80 3.86 %

800 3461.80 3459.80 3459.80 3459.80 3.59 %
1000 3447.80 3445.80 3445.80 3445.80 3.17 %
1200 3447.80 3445.80 3445.80 3445.80 3.17 %
1500 3447.80 3445.80 3445.80 3445.80 3.17 %
C101-50 3039.99 500 3172.80 3172.80 3172.80 3172.80 4.37 %
800 3151.80 3148.80 3147.80 3143.80 3.41 %
1000 3151.80 3139.80 3139.80 3139.80 3.28 %
1200 3151.80 3139.80 3139.80 3139.80 3.28 %
1500 3151.80 3139.80 3139.80 3139.80 3.28 %
R101 6007.77 500 6334.24 6334.24 6334.24 6334.24 5.43 %
800 6274.24 6264.24 6264.24 6264.24 4.26 %
1000 6259.24 6252.24 6252.24 6252.24 4.07 %
1200 6253.24 6252.24 6252.24 6252.24 4.07 %
1500 6259.24 6252.24 6251.24 6251.24 4.05 %
C101 6678.78 500 7052.16 7052.16 7052.16 7052.16 5.59 %
800 7050.16 7003.16 7000.16 7000.16 4.81 %
1000 7048.16 6970.16 6970.16 6970.16 4.36 %
1200 7048.16 6970.16 6968.16 6966.16 4.30 %
1500 7048.16 6970.16 6966.16 6966.16 4.30 %
This study refers to the parameter setting method of Mancini (2017) and selects the benchmark instances for parameter debugging.
Two categories of computation instances, including C101 and R101, are selected and used to generate different parameter settings. The
first category randomly selects 50 nodes from the two computation instances, denoted as C101-50 and R101-50. The second category
max
uses the original C101 and R101 instances, and tests Niter = (500, 800, 1000, 1200, 1500) and Nnoim iter = (10, 15, 20, 25), respectively.
Each instance is run 20 times and the solutions are averaged. The results are shown in Table 4. The first column is the name of the
computation instance, the second column is the best-known solution (BKS) obtained from Mancini (2017), the third column is the
max noim
maximum number of iterations Niter , the fourth to seventh columns are four different values of Niter , and the eighth column is the gap
between the average value of 20 runs under a given setting and the best-known solution.
In Table 4, in every test, the gap between the solution provided by ILS and the best-known solution is less than 6 %. When the
max
number of iterations is greater than 1000, the solution can still be improved, but the improvement is negligible. Therefore, setting Niter
noim
to 1000 can balance the quality of the solution and the computational efficiency. The test results of Niter show that when the number of
max
iterations Niter is small, even if the value of Nnoim iter is increased, the quality of the solution cannot be improved. Because ILS may not
converge after reaching the maximum number of iterations. When Nmax noim
iter is large, increasing the value of Niter can improve the quality of
the solution. Therefore, in this study that takes into account the quality of solution and the computation efficiency, 1000 and 15 are
reasonable values for (Nmax noim
iter , Niter ), respectively.
5.2.2. Computation comparison

The proposed ILS algorithm is compared with the adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) (Euchi and Sadok, 2021), hybrid
genetic-sweep algorithm (HGA) (Kuo, et al., 2022), and variable neighborhood search (VNS) (Puerto and Valverde, 2022) by using 25
different data instances to further demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The related algorithm parameters are
initialized as follows. For ALNS, the initial temperature factor, degree of destruction, and non-improvement parameter are 0.004, 0.15,
and 1000, respectively. For HGA, the population size, the mutation rate, generation number and the maximum iteration are 200, 0.8,
0.5, 1000 and 50, respectively. For VNS, the time limit is 10 min. For the proposed ILS algorithm, the number of iterations is 1000, and
if the solution remains unchanged for 15 consecutive iterations, the algorithm will be stopped.
The selected 25 data instances consisting of 30–200 customers are randomly generated in the range of 40 km × 40 km to solve
TDHRP-TDRTT by minimizing the total cost. Customer demands and time windows are obtained from C1_4_1 and R1_4_1 in Extended
Solomon Datasets (Wang et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2017b). The parameters Cp , CT , Cd , Cc , QT , Qd are 10, 0.5, 0.2, 0.1, 100, and 20
respectively. The speed of drone is 60 km/h, and the speed of truck is 50 km/h. The congestion ratio is assumed to be [1.0, 1.1], we
assume that the congestion cost per unit distance is 1.5 times of the congestion ratio, and the maximum flight range of a drone is 10 km.
The four algorithms are executed 30 times to obtain the best-known solutions for the selected 25 data instances and shown in Table 5.
Table 5 shows the best cost, average computational time, number of truck–drone pairs, and corresponding average values
calculated by the four heuristic algorithms for the 20 data instances. T-test and p-value results indicate that the best cost data are
significantly different between the selected 25 sets of data for the four algorithm test. In terms of cost savings, the proposed algorithm
mostly performs better than ALNS, HGA and VNS. With an increase in the number of customers, the proposed algorithm can achieve
more cost saving than the other algorithms. For example, the costs calculated from ALNS, HGA, VNS, and the proposed algorithm are
466.6, 450.4, 456.3 and 433.2, respectively, when the number of customers is 35; and the computational times are 64, 80, 92, and 77 s.
For the number of truck–drone pairs, the results calculated by the proposed algorithm are better than those of ALNS, HGA and VNS.
14
Y. Wang et al.
Table 5
Comparison of the ALNS, MRCH, VNS and ILS.
Instance Number of ALNS HGA VNS ILS
customers
Best cost Averagetime Number of Best cost Averagetime Number of Best cost Averagetime Number of Best Averagetime Number of
(s) pairs (s) pairs (s) pairs cost (s) pairs
1 30 389.9 45 4 408.7 55 4 403.2 59 4 386.2 54 4

2 35 466.6 64 4 450.4 80 4 456.3 92 4 433.2 77 4
3 40 458.1 83 4 473.0 106 4 472.8 108 4 449.2 97 4
4 45 528.9 106 5 492.7 130 5 531.3 137 5 536.1 132 5
5 50 507.3 137 5 515.1 173 5 499.7 178 5 462.5 162 5
6 55 586.9 154 5 597.2 186 5 583.8 191 5 558.6 184 5
7 60 611.2 175 6 648.9 219 6 602.7 235 6 589.2 206 6
8 65 681.1 197 6 666.2 250 6 658.4 267 6 645.1 230 6
9 70 698.3 222 6 738.4 268 6 675.4 282 6 668.1 264 6
10 75 786.9 231 7 801.4 290 7 799.5 305 7 765.0 283 7
11 80 897.9 248 7 949.9 320 7 874.0 374 7 845.0 305 7
15
12 85 910.8 267 8 946.5 323 8 924.6 321 8 922.1 312 7

13 90 1037.0 286 8 1062.2 350 8 1021.7 358 8 967.8 333 8
14 95 1098.7 307 9 1147.4 395 9 1102.1 396 9 1064.3 365 9
15 100 1109.4 328 10 1140.3 404 10 1062.0 451 10 1034.2 377 10
16 110 1193.7 345 12 1160.8 444 12 1154.3 426 13 1130.7 410 12
17 120 1332.0 373 14 1382.8 475 13 1278.0 532 13 1203.7 446 12
18 130 1473.3 428 14 1486.1 517 14 1477.3 545 14 1445.7 499 14
19 140 1631.8 475 15 1621.3 611 15 1594.8 604 14 1562.7 563 15
20 150 1809.3 526 16 1921.0 635 16 1933.4 623 15 1733.0 584 15
21 160 2012.5 604 18 2112.5 712 18 2036.7 725 17 1824.2 636 16
22 170 2268.4 672 21 2307.1 785 20 2249.4 791 19 1916.5 691 18
Transportation Research Part C 144 (2022) 103901

23 180 2427.1 733 21 2475.8 861 21 2418.2 882 21 2032.8 757 18
23 190 2594.6 796 23 2629.0 928 23 2603.0 937 23 2163.0 825 20
25 200 2733.9 867 24 2772.2 994 24 2725.5 1013 24 2311.6 889 21
Average 101 1209.8 346.8 10.9 1236.3 420.4 10.8 1205.5 433.3 10.7 1106 387.2 10.2
t-test –3.73 –4.24 –3.51
p-value 5.14E-04 1.44E-04 8.9E-04
Table 6
Parameter setting in the data source.
Parameter Definition Value
Cp Fixed cost of a truck–drone pair employed for delivery ¥320

CT General cost for a truck to travel a unit distance ¥2
Cd Cost for a drone to travel a unit distance ¥1.5
Cc The coordination cost at any truck–drone rendezvous node 0.5
QT The capacities of a truck 300
Qd The capacities of a drone 30
NN Number of customer nodes 50
R The maximum flight distance limitation of drones 10 km
CU Congestion duration 3h
vd The drone velocity 60 km/h
vT The maximum speed of trucks 50 km/h
Fig. 8. Spatial distribution of depot and customers.
16
Table 7
Distribution network dataset.
ID Longitude Latitude Demand Time Windows ID Longitude Latitude Demand Time Windows
1 106.551 29.564 0 [0, 150] 27 106.509 29.596 20.00 [10,85]

2 106.519 29.619 15.10 [76,87] 28 106.571 29.577 15.10 [80,100]
3 106.523 29.608 15.00 [58, 125] 29 106.568 29.569 11.65 [17,86]
4 106.518 29.608 23.98 [77,117] 30 106.567 29.558 18.11 [10,118]
5 106.517 29.601 15.7 [70,95] 31 106.555 29.566 18.17 [9,31]
6 106.497 29.605 15.00 [90,108] 32 106.568 29.564 15.08 [5,79]
7 106.504 29.614 11.71 [80,97] 33 106.577 29.568 12.97 [16,90]
8 106.504 29.607 10.50 [37, 105] 34 106.544 29.574 18.66 [28,118]
9 106.509 29.619 17.00 [80,137] 35 106.541 29.579 17.59 [29, 80]
10 106.534 29.593 14.60 [75, 126] 36 106.542 29.577 19.90 [45,114]
11 106.502 29.599 24.13 [32,131] 37 106.539 29.584 18.60 [58,109]
12 106.506 29.597 25.60 [53, 138] 38 106.544 29.587 16.20 [40,98]
13 106.558 29.616 15.06 [55, 128] 39 106.543 29.594 17.90 [16,39]
14 106.577 29.61 16.33 [25,62] 40 106.547 29.599 21.30 [30,57]
15 106.698 29.608 16.78 [34,128] 41 106.549 29.592 18.90 [47,124]
16 106.556 29.609 13.31 [28,77] 42 106.562 29.584 20.87 [30,113]
17 106.564 29.613 17.60 [30,101] 43 106.585 29.525 17.92 [3,34]
18 106.564 29.605 16.70 [36,137] 44 106.577 29.532 21.90 [20,116]
19 106.568 29.593 15.82 [28,65] 45 106.566 29.524 23.50 [30,35]
20 106.564 29.586 16.90 [30,109] 46 106.578 29.518 17.20 [35,112]
21 106.573 29.587 18.60 [13, 38] 47 106.569 29.538 16.10 [40,93]
22 106.579 29.586 14.10 [28,81] 48 106.532 29.554 15.30 [27,72]
23 106.565 29.588 20.20 [40,96] 49 106.583 29.536 18.30 [33,105]
24 106.565 29.592 17.00 [36,84] 50 106.585 29.543 19.80 [15,106]
25 106.559 29.585 23.60 [15,45] 51 106.588 29.545 20.60 [18,122]
26 106.557 29.583 22.94 [19, 42]
Table 8
The parameter ranges α under four road congestion ratios.
Status Free Slow Congested Severely congested
Congestion ratio [1.0, 1.1) [1.1, 1.3) [1.3, 1.6) [1.6, 2.4)
The proposed algorithm also outperforms the other algorithms in terms of best cost, average computational time, and number of
truck–drone pairs. Therefore, the proposed algorithm is superior to the three existing algorithms for TDHRP-TDRTT.
5.3. Case study
5.3.1. Data source

Traffic congestion restricts vehicle movements and affects on-time delivery, thereby increasing the complexity of solving TDHRP-
TDRTT. We use real-time road traffic data of Chongqing City from Baidu Map1 to quantify how road traffic affects the optimization
results of the proposed algorithm. Table 6 provides the relevant parameters.
Four traffic conditions are considered in this case study, namely, free-flow, slow, congested and severely congested. The locations of
the depot and customer nodes are randomly generated on the map of Chongqing City. Their locations are displayed in Fig. 8, and their
latitude and longitude coordinates with Baidu maps, demands and time windows are presented in Table 7. In addition, the time
windows of the depot and all customers are arranged between time periods [0, 180] with 3 h time horizon, and the congestion cost is
assumed to be 1.5 times of the congestion ratio.
Two different distance measures are applied during optimization. The Euclidean distance is used to compute the distance between a
drone and a customer (Panda et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2021), and the travel distance on the road network is used for trucks serving
customers. The road congestion ratio is defined as the congestion ratio of truck travel speed to free-flow speed. Table 8 provides the
range of the congestion ratio under each traffic condition. The congestion ratio is set as a piecewise linear function of t between 0 and
180, that is, t0 = 0 and t3 = 180. According to the “Implementation Regulations of the Road Traffic Safety Law of the People’s Republic
of China2”, there is only one motor vehicle lane in the same direction, and speed limits on urban roads are 50 km per hour. When
entering or exiting non-motorized vehicle lanes, passing railway crossings, sharp bends, narrow roads, and narrow bridges, the
maximum driving speed should not exceed 30 km per hour. Therefore, we define four congestion scenarios and analyze the impact of
traffic congestion on the time-dependent network in Table 8.
1
https://jiaotong.baidu.com/top/report/?citycode=132.
2
https://www.gov.cn/banshi/2005–08/23/content_25579.htm.
17
Fig. 9. Illustration of the best-found routes in TDVRP and TDHRP-TDRTT: (a) TDVRP routes and (b) TDHRP-TDRTT routes.
TDVRP TDHRP-TDRTT
450
400
400
350
300 300
300
Value (￥)
( )
250
200
144 147
150
100 57
50 30
0 0 0 0 5
0
Fixed cost of Fixed cost of Variable cost Variable cost Waiting cost Coordination
vehicel drone of trucks of drones cost
Cost items
Fig. 10. Cost analysis between TDHRP-TDRTT and TDVRP.
5.3.2. Vehicle routing under free-flow traffic

Free-flow traffic enables smooth operations and helps avoid service delays. Consequently, truck routes can effectively serve
assigned customers at the minimum operating cost. This sub-section compares the routing solutions of trucks alone in TDVRP with that
of truck–drone cooperation in TDHRP-TDRTT to evaluate the effect of introducing drones into distribution tasks.
Fig. 9 (a) shows that three trucks serve all customer nodes in the TDVRP solution. Following the customer assignment scheme, the
three trucks depart from the depot to serve 19, 14, and 17 customers, respectively. In Fig. 10, the fixed costs of TDVRP and TDHRP-
TDRTT are¥300 and¥300, the travel costs are¥400 and¥144, and the total costs are¥700 and¥683, respectively. The number of cus
tomers assigned to trucks decreases because 13 customer nodes are served by drones in the TDHRP-TDRTT solution in Fig. 9(b). A
comprehensive analysis of the TDHRP-TDRTT solution suggests that the cost related to drone operations is 34.99 % of the total
operating cost. Therefore, combining drones and trucks for urban logistics has a positive effect on reducing distribution costs.
Table 9 shows that pairing drones with trucks also effectively reduces the total time required to complete the delivery service.
Significant differences exist in the amount of time saved by different customer service sequences. For example, pair 1 saves 10 min,
whereas pair 2 saves 15 min. On average, the TDHRP-TDRTT scheme results in 16.1 % reduction in the total service time compared
18
Table 9
TDHRP-TDRTT best-found solutions.
Instance No. Routing Completion time (unit: Total
min) time
(unit:
min)
TDVRP R1 1 → 27 → 39 → 26 → 42 → 41 → 40 → 11 → 5 → 8 → 4 → 3 → 2 → 10 → 7 → 6 → 9 → 53 167
12 → 13 → 28 → 1
R2 1 → 32 → 31 → 51 → 50 → 45 → 47 → 48 → 44 → 46 → 49 → 35 → 36 → 38 → 37 → 1 68
R3 1 → 43 → 21 → 25 → 17 → 18 → 14 → 15 → 16 → 19 → 24 → 20 → 22 → 23 → 29 → 34 46
→ 33 → 30 → 1
TDHRP- Pair1_Truck 1 → 39 → 26 → 42 → 40 → 11 → 5 → 8 → 2 → 10 → 6 → 9 → 12 → 13 → 28 → 1 43 140
TDRTT Pair1_Drone 39 → 27 → 26→*41 → 42→*4 → 40 → 11 → 5 → 8 → 2 → 7 → 13 33
Pair2_Truck 1 → 31 → 32 → 51 → 45 → 47 → 48 → 46 → 49 → 35 → 36 → 38 → 1 53
Pair2_Drone 51→*50 → 45→*44 → 49 → 35 → 36→*37 → 38 43
Pair3_Truck 1 → 21 → 25 → 17 → 18 → 14 → 16 → 19 → 24 → 20 → 22 → 29 → 30 → 1 44
Pair3_Drone 21→*43 → 25 → 17→*15 → 24→*23 → 22→*34 → 29→*33 → 30 35
*
Customers delivered by drones.
Table 10
TDHRP-TDRTT best-found solution under different road congestion ratios.
Congestion Order Vehicle Routing
index
[1.1, 1.3) Pair 1 Truck 1 → 26 → 41 → 42 → 40 → 11 → 5 → 8 → 2 → 10 → 6 → 9 → 12 → 28 → 1

Drone 26→*27 → 41→*39 → 40 → 11→*4 → 8→*3 → 2 → 7 → 12→*13 → 28
Pair 2 Truck 1 → 32 → 31 → 45 → 47 → 48 → 46 → 49 → 35 → 38 → 36 → 1
Drone 45→*51 → 47→*50 → 48→*44 → 49 → 35→*37 → 38
Pair 3 Truck 1 → 21 → 25 → 17 → 18 → 16 → 19 → 24 → 20 → 22 → 34 → 30 → 1
Drone 21→*43 → 25→*14 → 18→*15 → 24→*23 → 22→*33 → 34→*29 → 30
[1.3,1.6) Pair 1 Truck 1 → 27 → 39 → 41 → 40 → 11 → 5 → 8 → 6 → 9 → 12 → 13 → 1
Drone 27→*28 → 39→*26 → 41→*42 → 40 → 11→*4 → 5→*3 → 8→*2 → 6→*10
→12→*7 → 13
Pair 2 Truck 1 → 32 → 31 → 45 → 47 → 44 → 46 → 49 → 35 → 36 → 1
Drone 45→*51 → 47→*50 → 44→*48 → 46 → 49→*38 → 35→*37 → 36
Pair 3 Truck 1 → 21 → 25 → 17 → 18 → 16 → 19 → 24 → 20 → 22 → 29 → 30 → 1
Drone 21→*43 → 25 → 17→*14 → 18→*15 → 19→*23 → 22→*34 → 29→*33 → 30
[1.6,2.4) Pair 1 Truck 1 → 27 → 39 → 41 → 42 → 40 → 11 → 5 → 6 → 9 → 12 → 13 → 1
Drone 27→*28 → 39→*26 → 41→*4 → 40 → 11→*3 → 5→*8 → 6→*2 → 9→*10 → 12 → 7 → 13
Pair 2 Truck 1 → 32 → 31 → 45 → 47 → 48 → 46 → 49 → 35 → 36 → 1
Drone 45→*51 → 47→*50 → 48→*44 → 46 → 49→*38 → 35→*37 → 36
Pair 3 Truck 1 → 21 → 25 → 18 → 16 → 19 → 24 → 20 → 22 → 29 → 1
Drone 21→*43 → 25→*17 → 18→*14 → 16→*15 → 19→*23 → 24→*30 → 20
→*34 → 22→*33 → 29
*
Customers delivered by drones.
with the TDVRP scheme. In the truck–drone pair scheme, the total number of customers visited by drones is 10, which accounts for 20
% of all customers. Our TDHRP-TDRTT solution uses 27 min less than the total time in the TDVRP solution.
5.3.3. Analysis of the TDHRP-TDRTT scheme under traffic congestion

The previous sub-section compared the advantages of the proposed TDHRP-TDRTT with those of the traditional TDVRP in a free-
flow condition. In this sub-section, three time-dependent travel times are imposed on TDHRP-TDRTT and TDVRP, with parameter αtij
varying within [1.1, 1.3), [1.3, 1.6) and [1.6, 2.4), respectively. Under each traffic condition, three truck–drone pairs service all
customers. Their service routes are shown in Table 10, where customers in bold are served by drones, and the two nodes before and
after each drone-served node are truck–drone rendezvous nodes.
Comparison of the routing solutions by TDHRP-TDRTT under three traffic conditions leads to the following conclusions.
(1) As roads become increasingly congested, the number of customers served by drones increases from 15 to 19 and 20. The reason
for this phenomenon is that the dynamics of the road network greatly reduces the efficiency of truck delivery, and the speed advantage
of drones makes customers receive high-quality services.
(2) Given the travel distance limitations of drones, when the customers to be served are geographically scattered, the drone can
only follow the truck to a location where a to-be-served customer is within its flight range to carry out the next delivery. For example,
the arc segments 28 → 27, 46 → 49, 1 → 13, and 31 → 45 are added to the initial drone service tabu list Nd* , because the arc lengths
exceed the maximum travel radius of the drone. Thus, they cannot be configured as a drone route.
We add another cost item, namely, the discarding penalty per node, to analyze the cost advantage of TDHRP-TDRTT in time-
dependent road networks, as shown in Fig. 11. As traffic condition deteriorates, the cost associated with truck delivery in TDHRP-
19
[1.6,2.4) TDVRP
TDHRP-TDRTT
TDVRP
[1.3,1.6)
TDHRP-TDRTT
TDVRP
[1.1,1.3)
TDHRP-TDRTT
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 Cost( )

Coordination cost Penalty cost for discarding Penalty cost for delay Waiting cost
Variable cost of drones Variable cost of trucks Fixed cost of drones Fixed cost of trucks
Fig. 11. Cost comparison of TDHRP-TDRTT under different road congestion ratios.
Hybrid truck–drone Truck-only

300
Time consumption(min)
250
200
150
100
50
0
0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0 5.5 6.0
The congestion index
Fig. 12. Comparison of time consumption in pair 2 with different congestion ratios and river areas.
TDRTT decreases. Correspondingly, the cost associated with drone distribution increases. TDVRP causes serious delivery delays due to
congestion; customers are discarded in several instances. By contrast, TDHRP-TDRTT effectively avoids customer service failure and
reduces delivery delays. The solution of TDHRP-TDRTT is generally superior to that of TDVRP. A remarkable advantage of TDHRP-
TDRTT, as shown in Table 10, is that it can effectively avoid the penalty of discarding customers and thus serve all customers
within their time windows. By contrast, the conventional TDVRP solution fails to serve all customer nodes and discards 1, 3, and 5
customers with penalty costs of ¥20, ¥60, and ¥100, respectively, under the three traffic conditions. Therefore, even when the road
network is free-flow, truck-only delivery still costs more than truck–drone delivery; truck–drone serves all customers in their given
time windows even when the congested index is highest at [1.6, 2.4).
The route of the pair 2 in Table 10 crosses four bridges on Jialing River and Yangtze River in Chongqing City. We analyze the
20
[1.0,1.1) 1 39 26 41 42 40 11 5 8 2 10 6 9 12 13 28 1
27 3 4 7
[1,1.1.3) 1 26 41 42 40 11 5 8 2 10 6 9 12 28 1
27 39 4 3 7 13
[1.3,1.6) 1 27 39 41 40 11 5 8 6 9 12 13 1
28 26 42 4 3 2 10 7
[1.6,2.4) 1 27 39 41 42 40 11 5 6 9 12 13 1
28 26 4 3 8 2 10 7
Customers visited by trucks Customers visited by drones
Fig. 13. Truck–drone best-found routes under four road congestion ratios.
Table 11
Truck and drone allocation in a time-varying road traffic network.
αtij [1.0, 1.1) [1.1, 1.3) [1.3, 1.6) [1.6, 2.4)
The type of vehicle Truck Drone Truck Drone Truck Drone Truck Drone
Number of customers 40 10 39 15 31 19 30 20
The time-consumption of the longest pair routes (unit: min) 53 43 75 50 75 52 94 76
The average pair routes (unit: min) 47 37 58 42 60 47 84 64
The average distance between customer nodes (unit: m) 2029 1977 1983 2023 1886 2359 1853 2632
influence of the four bridges on travel time in Fig. 12. As the congestion worsens, the time consumption of truck-only delivery increases
rapidly, whereas that of the hybrid truck–drone delivery increases more slowly. In particular, when the congestion ratio is equal to 2.0,
the truck spends 20 min on the Yangtze River Bridge with a length of only 1 km. In this circumstance, the drone paired with the truck
can serve customers across the river in advance, thereby significantly reducing truck service time. Meanwhile, we found that if the
congestion continues increasing after exceeding 4.0, the solution will not be improved further. Therefore, the truck–drone solution has
advantages in an area with terrain constraints (e.g., with rivers and bridges).
Comparing Table 10 and Fig. 11, when the congestion ratio is [1.0, 1.1), all delivery tasks are fulfilled without discarding customers
and delays in the TDVRP scheme; and when the congestion ratio is greater than 1.1, trucks and drones must coordinate delivery to
avoid customer loss and delay. Moreover, we checked all the paths and found that when the congestion ratio is [1.0, 1.1), it is more
appropriate to remove the drone node of pair 1 and use only trucks for delivery. There are mainly-two scenarios. First, the demand
from every node on the pairing path exceeds the capacity of the drone, and thus no node can be served by the drone. Second, the road
traffic conditions are good, and the drone does not need to coordinate with the truck. The tasks can be completed independently (that
is, a certain truck may not use a drone). Therefore, the drone may not be allowed to be used in the above two scenarios.
6. Analysis and discussion
6.1. Sensitivity analysis
The macro-level cost analysis previously provided can help understand the cost improvement of truck–drone collaborative dis
tribution in complex congestion scenarios. Insights can be gained from a detailed truck–drone pair analysis. With pair 1 shown in
Table 9 as an instance, the truck–drone collaboration schemes under the four traffic conditions are illustrated in Fig. 13, and the
workload, time consumption, and average distance of three pairs are shown in Table 10.
The following conclusions can be obtained from Table 11.
(1) The number of times that the truck and drone routes cross with each other increases with worsening congestion. For example,
21
25%
[1.0,1.1) [1.1,1.3)
[1.3,1.6) [1.6,2.4) 21.3%
20.6%
Cost saving(%) 20%
15% 13.9% 13.9%
11.5%
10% 9.2%
7.9% 7.9% 7.9%
6.3%
5% 3.9% 4.0% 4.2%
2.6% 2.8% 2.9%
0%
5 10 15 20
R(km)
Fig. 14. Cost saving percentages of different drone maximum flight ranges for TDHRP-TDRTT versus TDVRP.
Table A1
Symbols and definitions used in Newell (1982) for the fluid queueing model.
Symbols Definitions
LL Link length.
t0 Start time of congestion period.
t1 Time with maximum inflow rate.
t2 Time with maximum queue length.
t3 End time of congestion period.
CU Congestion duration, CU=t3–t0.
D Total arrival demand during the entire congestion period.
δ Shape parameter used in polynomial form.
μ Departure rate (i.e., discharge rate).
λ(t) Arrival rate function at time slot t.
A(t) Cumulative arrival count at time slot t.
D(t) Cumulative departure count at time slot t.
Q(t) Time-dependent queue length at time slot t.
LTTl(t) Travel time function of time-dependent link l.
PTTρ(t) Travel time function of time-dependent path ρ.
w(t) Time-dependent delay departing at time slot t.
FTl Free-flow travel time link l.
when the index is [1.0, 1.1), the two routes cross 10 times; when the index is [1.6, 2.4), the number increases to 20 times. A reasonable
conclusion is that when the traffic condition worsens, the synergistic effect from truck–drone collaboration is expanded.
(2) As congestion intensifies, the number of interactions between drones and trucks increases, leading to frequent drone flights and
reduced tasks for trucks. Trucks suffer from numerous delays, thereby resulting in customer service being discarded in heavy
congestion, however, drones are unaffected. Under heavy congestion, truck routes tend to connect geographically adjacent customer
nodes, whereas scattered customers within a drone’s flight range are almost always served by drones. For example, the average
distance among the 20 customer nodes served by drones is 2632 m, whereas the average distance among the customer nodes served by
trucks is only 1853 m (the index of [1.6, 2.4) in Table 10). Many customers need a short delivery time, but only a few customers agree
to take off and land drones. This situation stimulates competitiveness in time-dependent road traffic networks. As the risk of service
delay increases with congestion level, the motivation to serve certain customer nodes by drones also increases.
A sensitivity analysis is conducted and shown in Fig. 14 to investigate the influences of different drone maximum flight ranges (R)
(i.e., 5, 10, 15, and 20 km) on the cost savings of TDHRP-TDRTT in comparison with those of TDVRP.
Fig. 14 shows that the cost saving percentages of truck–drone coordinated delivery with the increase of the drone maximum flight
range and congestion ratio. For example, compared with the TDVRP, the cost saving percentage increases from 11.5 % to 20.6 % as the
22
Fig. A1. General graphical illustration of queue evolution for a road link and a single congestion period (Newell, 1982).
drone maximum flight range increases from 10 km to 15 km when the index is [1.6, 2.4). We also observe that there is basically no
change in the cost saving percentage when the drone maximum flight range increases from 15 km to 20 km. The reason may be that the
drone maximum flight range nearly exceeds the maximum delivery distance among customers, then the drone flight range constraint is
eliminated. The experimental result shows that the drone can work effectively on a suitable flight range, which is closely related to the
actual application case.
6.2. Management insights
The following managerial insights can be obtained from the computational experiments.
(1) The participation of drones in delivery makes the entire distribution system flexible in coping with time-dependent traffic
conditions. Although trucks can also survive the varying traffic by selecting relatively free roads at different time segments, the ability
of trucks to survive is limited. This limitation is evident from the sharp increase in the logistics cost of truck-only delivery when the
traffic condition worsens. This finding is expected because trucks cannot escape ground traffic. By contrast, drones are completely
immune to ground traffic and can fly over congested roads and blocks. With drones, the distribution system has additional options for
coping with varying traffic conditions. With deteriorating ground traffic, the logistics cost of truck–drone coordinated delivery exhibits
a mild increasing trend, which presents a strong contrast with the trend of the truck-only delivery cost and demonstrates the signif
icance of drone delivery.
(2) The participation of drones in delivery extends the service range of trucks especially in a special road network with a river or
hill in between. A bridge across a river or a tunnel through a hill often divides a city into halves, and is recognized as a bottleneck in
urban transportation. The travel time under such a bottleneck is generally more susceptible to time-dependent traffic than that on a
common road. However, trucks may have no choice but to traverse the bottleneck and bear the risk of being caught in heavy traffic to
serve customers with specific time windows on the other side of a city. This scenario considerably increases the logistics cost and
reduces the efficiency of the transportation system. Conditions are completely different when drones are made to fly over a river or hill
to serve the customers there. In this manner, drones cannot only extend the service range of trucks but also reduce the need to take the
bottleneck and relieve the congestion of the bottleneck.
(3) This study highlights the benefit of time-dependent cooperation of trucks and drones, which lays the foundation for gov
ernments to lessen the regulatory barriers of drone flight. The time-dependent cooperation of vehicles utilizes their respective
strengths, namely, the large capacity and range of trucks and the free and cheap flight of drones. The economic profit obtained from
time-dependent cooperation and the social benefit provided by shortened truck routes and relieved traffic are good reasons for
governments to minimize restrictions on drone flight and encourage logistics companies to participate in drone-delivery projects.
7. Conclusions
This study presents a truck–drone hybrid routing problem with time-dependent road travel time (TDHRP-TDRTT). A mathematical
23
model for TDHRP-TDRTT is constructed and a solution algorithm on the basis of the problem characteristics is designed. The per
formance of the proposed algorithm is analyzed in a case study using real-time traffic data of Chongqing City, China. The routing
schemes for TDHRP-TDRTT and conventional TDVRP are compared under different traffic conditions.
Our results show that the solution of TDHRP-TDRTT generally outperforms that of TDVRP. First, although TDHRP-TDRTT involves
additional scheduling costs associated with drones compared with TDVRP, the total combined cost of trucks and drones in TDHRP-
TDRTT is smaller than that in TDVRP. Second, the TDHRP-TDRTT solution can effectively reduce the total service time and thus
performs the delivery tasks more efficiently than the TDVRP solution does. Third, the TDHRP-TDRTT solution ensures that customers
are served immediately, and avoids delaying or discarding customers.
Comparison of the TDHRP-TDRTT solutions under different traffic conditions provides the following conclusions. First, with
increasing congestion levels, the distribution cost of drones increases, whereas the cost associated with trucks decreases. Second, with
heavy road congestion and a special road network layout with a river or a hill in between, trucks tend to visit geographically adjacent
customer nodes, and the scattered customer nodes or customer nodes distributed at special locations are allocated to drone services.
Third, with the aggravation of road traffic congestion, the number of crossings between truck and drone routes increases, and
increasing number of customers are served by drones. Fourth, with an increase in drone maximum flight range, additional cost savings
can be achieved by TDHRP-TDRTT compared with TDVRP.
Furthermore, the outbreak of COVID-19 highlights the importance of truck–drone delivery. Designing a relatively closed regional
truck–drone delivery network can reduce the transportation time, including quarantine time when trucks perform delivery tasks across
regions, thereby ensuring the timeliness of customer services and accessibility of cargo delivery under an emergency situation.
Therefore, this study shows that the proposed truck–drone collaboration mode has a positive effect on the construction and optimi
zation of emergency logistics networks. In addition, the proposed TDHRP-TDRTT provides intriguing and promising extensions of
existing logistics schemes. Future research can pursue the following directions: (1) optimizing a time-dependent pickup and delivery
logistics network and studying the potential relationship between truck–drone collaboration mode and travel costs, (2) investigating
the effects of real-time traffic information on the robustness of the truck–drone collaboration strategy, (3) exploring the potential
benefits of expanding TDHRP-TDRTT to multi-depot logistics distribution networks, and (4) applying the combination of deep
learning, evolutionary computing, and heuristics algorithms to address the related problems in the truck–drone delivery with dynamic
customer demands.
CREDIT author.
All the authors approved the final manuscript.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Yong Wang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Resources,
Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Zheng
Wang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Resources, Visualization,
Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Xiangpei Hu: Re
sources, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Guiqin Xue:
Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Resources, Visualization. Xiangyang Guan: Writing – original draft, Writing – review &
editing.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express our sincere appreciation for the valuable comments made by three anonymous reviewers, which
helped us to improve the quality of this paper. This research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No.
71871035, 71971036, 71931009), Key Science and Technology Research Project of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission
(KJZD-K202000702), Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing in 2022 (2022NSCQ-MSX1870), and the Team Building Project for
Graduate Tutors in Chongqing (No. JDDSTD2019008). In addition, special thanks are given to Yuanhan Wei from Dalian University of
Technology, China for her valuable suggestions and revisions.
Appendix A. Description of a graphical illustration of queue evolution of a road link
Truck travel time is constrained by road capacity in the state of congestion. In other words, when the total inflow travel demand
exceeds the road capacity, the queue will be formed. In this case, the travel time contains free-flow travel time and time spent in the
24
queue (i.e., travel delay). The generation of time-dependent link travel time is based on the extended congestion period with queue
length evolution and dynamics of travel inflow demands. Table A1 summarizes relevant symbols and definitions of the fluid queueing
model. A graphical illustration of queue evolution of a road link introduced by Newell (1982) can be shown in Fig. A1.
In Fig. A1(a), the gold curve expresses the arrival rate function λ(t) and green straight line represents the departure rate μ. The
arrival rate at time t can be approximated by the quadratic Taylor expansion (Newell, 1982; Cheng et al., 2022).
1 ′
(A.1)
′
λ(t) = λ(t1 ) + λ (t1 )(t − t1 ) + λ ′ (t1 )(t − t1 )2
2
Givenλ (t1 ) = 0, and letδ = − 12λ ′ (t1 ), then Eq. (A.1) can be simplified as follows.
′ ′
λ(t) = λ(t1 ) − δ ⋅ (t − t1 )2 (A.2)

The queue departure rate or discharge rate μ can be expressed asμ = λ(t0 ) = λ(t2 ), as shown in Fig. A1(a), that is, λ(t) can be
expressed as:
λ(t) = δ ⋅ (t − t0 ) ⋅ (t2 − t) + μ (A.3)
The cumulative time-dependent queue length Q(t) can be defined as the total delay between A(t) and D(t) from t0 to t3 in Fig. A1(b)
and A1(c), which can be obtained as follows.
∫t ∫t [t − t t − t0 ]
(A.4)
2 0
Q(t) = A(t) − D(t) = [λ(u) − μ]du = [δ ⋅ (u − t0 ) ⋅ (t2 − u)]du = δ ⋅ (t − t0 )2 −
t0 t0 2 3
In Fig. A1(b), the time-dependent queue length Q(t3) = 0 at the clearance time slot t3, and then the following relationship can be
obtained from Eq. (A.4) as follows.
2
t2 − t0 = (t3 − t0 ) (A.5)
3
Then, Eq. (A.4) can be expressed as:
δ
Q(t) = ⋅ (t − t0 )2 (t3 − t) (A.6)
3
The time-dependent delay can be further calculated based on the study from Cheng et al. (2022) as follows.
Q(t) δ
w(t) = = ⋅ (t − t0 )2 (t3 − t) (A.7)
μ 3μ
The time-dependent travel time of link l during congestion periods can be calculated as follows.
δ
LTTl (t) = w(t) + FTl = ⋅ (t − t0 )2 (t3 − t) + FTl (A.8)
3μ
References
Agatz, N., Bouman, P., Schmidt, M., 2018. Optimization approaches for the traveling salesman problem with drone. Transport. Sci. 52 (4), 965–981.
Allahyari, S., Yaghoubi, S., Woensel, T.V., 2021. The secure time-dependent vehicle routing problem with uncertain demands. Comput. Oper. Res. 131, 105253.
Alqahtani, M., Hu, M.Q., 2022. Dynamic energy scheduling and routing of multiple electric vehicles using deep reinforcement learning. Energy 244, 122626.
Amukele, T.K., Ness, P.M., Tobian, A.A., Boyd, J.S., Street, J., 2017. Drone transportation of blood products. Transfusion 57 (3), 582–588.
Aziez, I., Côté, J.F., Coelho, L.C., 2022. Fleet sizing and routing of healthcare automated guided vehicles. Transport. Res. E: Logist. Transport. Rev. 161, 102679.
Balseiro, S.R., Loiseau, I., Ramonet, J., 2011. An ant colony algorithm hybridized with insertion heuristics for the time dependent vehicle routing problem with time
windows. Comput. Oper. Res. 38 (6), 954–966.
Basso, R., Kulcsár, B., Sanchez-Diaz, I., Qu, X.B., 2022. Dynamic stochastic electric vehicle routing with safe reinforcement learning. Transport. Res. E: Logist.
Transport. Rev. 157, 102496.
Batista, S.F.A., Leclercq, L., Menéndez, M., 2021. Dynamic Traffic Assignment for regional networks with traffic-dependent trip lengths and regional paths. Transport.
Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 127, 103076.
Bouman, P., Agatz, N., Schmidt, M., 2018. Dynamic programming approaches for the traveling salesman problem with drone. Networks 72 (4), 528–542.
Boysen, N., Briskorn, D., Fedtke, S., Schwerdfeger, S., 2018. Drone delivery from trucks: drone scheduling for given truck routes. Networks 72 (4), 506–527.
Brandão, J., 2020. A memory-based iterated local search algorithm for the multi-depot open vehicle routing problem. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 284, 559–571.
Bruglieri, M., Ferone, D., Festa, P., Pisacane, O., 2022. A GRASP with penalty objective function for the green vehicle routing problem with private capacitated
stations. Comput. Oper. Res. 143, 105770.
Carey, M., Humphreys, P., McHugh, M., Mclvor, R., 2014. Extending travel-time based models for dynamic network loading and assignment, to achieve adherence to
first-in-first-out and link capacities. Transport. Res. B: Methodol. 65, 90–104.
Carlsson, J.G., Song, S., 2018. Coordinated logistics with a truck and a drone. Manage. Sci. 64 (9), 4052–4069.
Cavani, S., Iori, M., Roberti, R., 2021. Exact methods for the traveling salesman problem with multiple drones. Transport. Res. C: Emerg. Technol., 130, 103280.
Chen, B.Y., Chen, X., Chen, H., Lam, W.H., 2020. Efficient algorithm for finding k shortest paths based on re-optimization technique. Transport. Res. E: Logist.
Transport. Rev. 133, 101819.
25
Cheng, Q.X., Liu, Z.Y., Guo, J.F., Wu, X., Pendyala, R., Belezamo, B., Zhou, X.S., 2022. Estimating key traffic state parameters through parsimonious spatial queue
models. Transport. Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 137, 103596.
Croes, G.A., 1958. A method for solving traveling-salesman problems. Oper. Res. 6 (6), 791–812.
Dabia, S., Ropke, S., Van Woensel, T., De Kok, T., 2013. Branch and price for the time-dependent vehicle routing problem with time windows. Transport. Sci. 47 (3),
380–396.
Derigs, U., Pullmann, M., Vogel, U., 2013. Truck and trailer routing-Problems, heuristics and computational experience. Comput. Oper. Res. 40 (2), 536–546.
Donati, A.V., Montemanni, R., Casagrande, N., Rizzoli, A.E., Gambardella, L.M., 2008. Time dependent vehicle routing problem with a multi ant colony system. Eur. J.
Oper. Res. 185 (3), 1174–1191.
Dorling, K., Heinrichs, J., Messier, G.G., Magierowski, S., 2017. Vehicle routing problems for drone delivery. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybernet. 47 (1), 70–85.
Euchi, J., Sadok, A., 2021. Hybrid genetic-sweep algorithm to solve the vehicle routing problem with drones. Phys. Commun. 44, 101236.
Flood, M.M., 1956. The traveling-salesman problem. Oper. Res. 4 (1), 61–75.
Freitas, J.C., Penna, P.H., 2018. A randomized variable neighborhood descent heuristic to solve the flying sidekick traveling salesman problem. Electronic Notes
Discrete Math. 66, 95–102.
Gendreau, M., Ghiani, G., Guerriero, E., 2015. Time-dependent routing problems: a review. Comput. Oper. Res. 42 (6), 189–197.
Gerdessen, J.C., 1996. Vehicle routing problem with trailers. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 93 (1), 135–147.
Gonzalez-R, P.L., Canca, D., Andrade-Pineda, J.L., Calle, M., Leon-Blanco, J.M., 2020. Truck-drone team logistics: a heuristic approach to multi-drop route planning.
Transport. Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 114, 657–680.
Ham, A.M., 2018. Integrated scheduling of m-truck, m-drone, and m-depot constrained by time-window, drop-pickup, and m-visit using constraint programming.
Transport. Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 91, 1–14.
Heath, N., 2015. The long-range drone that can keep up with a car and fly for an hour. https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/the-long-range-
drone-that-can- keep-up-with-a-car-and-fly-for-an-hour/. October 4, 2015.
Heni, H., Coelho, L.C., Renaud, J., 2019. Determining time-dependent minimum cost paths under several objectives. Comput. Oper. Res. 105, 102–117.
Hern, A., 2014. DHL launches first commercial drone “parcelcopter” delivery service. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/25/german-dhl-launches-
first/ commercial-drone-delivery-service. September 25, 2014.
Hoogeboom, M., Dullaert, W., 2019. Vehicle routing with arrival time diversification. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 275 (1), 93–107.
Huang, Y., Zhao, L., Van Woensel, T., Gross, J., 2017. Time-dependent vehicle routing problem with path flexibility. Transport. Res. B: Methodol. 95, 169–195.
Jeong, H.Y., Song, B.D., Lee, S., 2019. Truck–drone hybrid delivery routing: payload-energy dependency and No-Fly zones. Int. J. Prod. Econ. 214, 220–233.
Kim, D., Lee, K., Moon, I., 2019. Stochastic facility location model for drones considering uncertain flight distance. Ann. Oper. Res. 283 (1), 1283–1302.
Kim, S., Moon, I., 2019. Traveling salesman problem with a drone station. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybernet: Syst. 49 (1), 42–52.
Kitjacharoenchai, P., Ventresca, M., Moshrefjavadi, M., Lee, S., Tanchoco, J.M., Brunese, P.A., 2019. Multiple traveling salesman problem with drones: mathematical
model and heuristic approach. Comput. Ind. Eng. 129, 14–30.
Kitjacharoenchai, P., Min, B., Lee, S., 2020. Two echelon vehicle routing problem with drones in last mile delivery. Int. J. Prod. Econ. 225, 107598.
Krebs, C., Ehmke, J.F., 2021. Axle weights in combined vehicle routing and container loading problems. EURO J. Transport. Logist. 10, 100043.
Kuo, R.J., Lu, S.H., Lai, P.Y., Mara, S.T.W., 2022. Vehicle routing problem with drones considering time windows. Expert Syst. Appl. 191, 116264.
Kuo, Y., Wang, C., Chuang, P., 2009. Optimizing goods assignment and the vehicle routing problem with time-dependent travel speeds. Comput. Ind. Eng. 57 (4),
1385–1392.
Lei, H., Laporte, G., Guo, B., 2012. The vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and split deliveries. INFOR: Inform. Syst. Operat. Res. 50 (2), 59–71.
Li, J., Dhiaf, M., Dong, J.F., Liang, C.Y., Zhao, S.P., 2020. A traveling salesman problem with time windows for the last mile delivery in online shopping. Int. J. Prod.
Res. 58 (16), 5077–5088.
Lin, S., 1965. Computer solutions of the traveling salesman problem. Bell Syst. Tech. J. 44 (10), 2245–2269.
Lin, S., Yu, V.F., Lu, C., 2011. A simulated annealing heuristic for the truck and trailer routing problem with time windows. Expert Syst. Appl. 38 (12), 15244–15252.
Liu, S., 2013. A hybrid population heuristic for the heterogeneous vehicle routing problems. Transport. Res. E: Logist. Transport. Rev. 54, 67–78.
Liu, Y., 2019. An optimization-driven dynamic vehicle routing algorithm for on-demand meal delivery using drones. Comput. Oper. Res. 111, 1–20.
Lu, J.W., Nie, Q.H., Mahmoudi, M., Ou, J.S., Li, C.N., Zhou, X.S., 2022. Rich arc routing problem in city logistics: Models and solution algorithms using a fluid queue-
based time-dependent travel time representation. Working Paper. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359308792_Rich_arc_routing_problem_in_city_
logistics_Models_and_solution_algorithms_using_a_fluid_queue-based_time-dependent_travel_time_representation>.
Malandraki, C., Daskin, M.S., 1992. Time dependent vehicle routing problems: formulations, properties, and heuristic algorithms. Transport. Sci. 26 (3), 185–200.
Mancini, S., 2017. A combined multistart random constructive heuristic and set partitioning based formulation for the vehicle routing problem with time dependent
travel times. Comput. Oper. Res. 88, 290–296.
Máximo, V.R., Nascimento, M.C.V., 2021. A hybrid adaptive iterated local search with diversification control to the capacitated vehicle routing problem. Eur. J. Oper.
Res. 294 (3), 1108–1119.
Moshref-Javadi, M., Hemmati, A., Winkenbach, M., 2021. A comparative analysis of synchronized truck-and-drone delivery models. Comput. Ind. Eng. 162, 107648.
Murray, C.C., Chu, A.G., 2015. The flying sidekick traveling salesman problem: optimization of drone-assisted parcel delivery. Transport. Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 54,
86–109.
Murray, C.C., Raj, R., 2020. The multiple flying sidekicks traveling salesman problem: parcel delivery with multiple drones. Transport. Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 110,
368–398.
Neves-Moreira, F., Silva, D.P., Guimarães, L., Amorim, P., Almada-Lobo, B., 2018. The time window assignment vehicle routing problem with product dependent
deliveries. Transport. Res. E: Logist. Transport. Rev. 116, 163–183.
Newell, G.F., 1982. Applications of queueing theory, second ed. Chapman and Hall Ltd, New York.
Ngowi, R., 2016. UPS testing drones for use in its package delivery system. http://phys.org/news/2016-09-ups-drones-package-delivery.html. September 23, 2016.
Nguyen, M., A., Dang, G., T. H., Hà, M. H., & Pham, M. T. (2022). The min-cost parallel drone scheduling vehicle routing problem. Eur. J. Operat. Res. 299(3),
910–930.
Panda, A., Pachori, R.B., Sinnappah-Kang, N.D., 2021. Classification of chronic myeloid leukemia neutrophils by hyperspectral imaging using Euclidean and
Mahalanobis distances. Biomed. Signal Process. Control 70, 103025.
Parragh, S.N., Cordeau, J., 2017. Branch-and-price and adaptive large neighborhood search for the truck and trailer routing problem with time windows. Comput.
Oper. Res. 83, 28–44.
Puerto, J., Valverde, C., 2022. Routing for unmanned aerial vehicles: touring dimensional sets. Eur. J. Oper. Res. 298 (1), 118–136.
Qin, W., Zhuang, Z.L., Huang, Z.Z., Huang, H.Z., 2021. A novel reinforcement learning-based hyper-heuristic for heterogeneous vehicle routing problem. Comput. Ind.
Eng. 156, 107252.
Qiu, H.X., Wang, S.T., Yin, Y.Q., Wang, D.J., Wang, Y.Z., 2022. A deep reinforcement learning-based approach for the home delivery and installation routing problem.
Int. J. Prod. Econ. 244, 108362.
Regnier-Coudert, O., McCall, J., Ayodele, M., Anderson, S., 2016. Truck and trailer scheduling in a real world, dynamic and heterogeneous context. Transport. Res. E:
Logist. Transport. Rev. 93, 389–408.
Ruiz, E., Sotomendoza, V., Barbosa, A.E., Reyes, R., 2019. Solving the open vehicle routing problem with capacity and distance constraints with a biased random key
genetic algorithm. Comput. Ind. Eng. 133, 207–219.
Schermer, D., Moeini, M., Wendt, O., 2019. A matheuristic for the vehicle routing problem with drones and its variants. Transport. Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 106,
166–204.
Shavarani, S.M., Nejad, M.G., Rismanchian, F., Izbirak, G., 2018. Application of hierarchical facility location problem for optimization of a drone delivery system: a
case study of Amazon prime air in the city of San Francisco. Int. J. Adv. Manufact. Technol. 95 (9), 3141–3153.
26
Tamke, F., Buscher, U., 2021. A branch-and-cut algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with drones. Transport. Res. B: Methodol. 144, 174–203.
Wang, Y., Ma, X.L., Lao, Y.T., Wang, Y.H., Mao, H.J., 2013. Vehicle routing problem: simultaneous deliveries and pickups with split loads and time windows.
Transport. Res. Record: J. Transport. Res. Board 2378, 120–128.
Wang, Y., Ma, X.L., Liu, M.W., Gong, K., Liu, Y., Xu, M.Z., Wang, Y.H., 2017b. Cooperation and profit allocation in two-echelon logistics joint distribution network
optimization. Appl. Soft Comput. 56, 143–157.
Wang, Y., Assogba, K., Fan, J., Xu, M., Liu, Y., Wang, H., 2019. Multi-depot green vehicle routing problem with shared transportation resource: Integration of time-
dependent speed and piecewise penalty cost. J. Cleaner Prod. 232, 12–29.
Wang, X., Poikonen, S., Golden, B.L., 2017a. The vehicle routing problem with drones: several worst-case results. Optim. Lett. 11 (4), 679–697.
Wang, Z., Sheu, J., 2019. Vehicle routing problem with drones. Transport. Res. B: Methodol. 122, 350–364.
Wang, S.Y., Tian, Z., Dong, K.J., Xie, Q., 2021. Inconsistency of neighborhood based on Voronoi tessellation and Euclidean distance. J. Alloy. Compd. 854, 156983.
Wang, Y., Zhang, J., Assogba, K., Liu, Y., Xu, M.Z., Wang, Y.H., 2018. Collaboration and transportation resource sharing in multiple centers vehicle routing
optimization with delivery and pickup. Knowl.-Based Syst. 160 (15), 296–310.
Wang, Y., Zhang, S.L., Guan, X.Y., Peng, S.G., Wang, H.Z., Liu, Y., Xu, M.Z., 2020. Collaborative multi-depot logistics network design with time window assignment.
Expert Syst. Appl. 140, 112910.
Wu, Y.X., Song, W., Cao, Z.G., Zhang, J., Lim, A., 2021. Learning improvement heuristics for solving routing problems. IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst.
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3068828.
Xiao, Y., Konak, A., 2016. The heterogeneous green vehicle routing and scheduling problem with time-varying traffic congestion. Transport. Res. E: Logist. Transport.
Rev. 88, 146–166.
Xu, Z., Elomri, A., Pokharel, S., Mutlu, F., 2019. A model for capacitated green vehicle routing problem with the time-varying vehicle speed and soft time windows.
Comput. Ind. Eng. 137, 106011.
Yan, R., Zhu, X.P., Zhu, X.N., Peng, R., 2022. Optimal routes and aborting strategies of trucks and drones under random attacks. Reliab. Eng. Syst. Saf. 222, 108457.
Zeng, F., Chen, Z., Clarke, J.P., Goldsman, D., 2022. Nested vehicle routing problem: optimizing drone-truck surveillance operations. Transport. Res. C: Emerg.
Technol. 139, 103645.
Zhang, K., He, F., Zhang, Z.C., Lin, X., Li, M., 2020. Multi-vehicle routing problems with soft time windows: A multi-agent reinforcement learning approach.
Transport. Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 121, 102861.
Zhang, G.W., Zhu, N., Ma, S.F., Xia, J., 2021. Humanitarian relief network assessment using collaborative truck-and-drone system. Transport. Res. E: Logist. Transport.
Rev. 152, 102417.
Zhen, L., Xu, Z.H., Ma, C.L., Xiao, L.Y., 2020. Hybrid electric vehicle routing problem with mode selection. Int. J. Prod. Res. 58 (2), 562–576.
Zhou, X.S., Cheng, Q.X., Wu, X., Li, P.H., Belezamo, B., Lu, J.W., Abbasi, M., 2022. A meso-to-macro cross-resolution performance approach for connecting polynomial
arrival queue model to volume-delay function with inflow demand-to-capacity ratio. Multimodel Transport. 1 (2), 100017.
Zhou, Z., Roncoli, C., 2022. A scalable vehicle assignment and routing strategy for real-time on-demand ridesharing considering endogenous congestion. Transport.
Res. C: Emerg. Technol. 139, 103658.
Zhu, L., Hu, D.W., 2019. Study on the vehicle routing problem considering congestion and emission factors. Int. J. Prod. Res. 57 (19), 6115–6129.
Zhu, L., Rousseau, L.M., Rei, W., Li, B., 2014. Paired cooperative reoptimization strategy for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands. Comput. Oper. Res.
50, 1–13.
27

1 s2.0 S0968090X2200314X Main

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

1 s2.0 S0968090X2200314X Main

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Transportation Research Part C 144 (2022) 103901

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Transportation Research Part C

Truck–drone hybrid routing problem with time-dependent road

Fig. 1. Time-dependent traffic condition variation in Chongqing, China.

3. Problem statement and mathematical model

3.1. Problem statement

• A drone can be launched from and retrieved at any customer node.

Truck arc Drone customer Truck customer Depot

Fig. 2. Illustration of TDHRP-TDRTT optimization.

3.2. Mathematical model

N Set of all customer nodes.

Time-windows Preprocessing in Section 4.1

Generate truck-only routes by the classic greedy

Modify the truck-only routes to truck–drone

Set the current solution as the initial solution

Relocate a customer of a truck-drone route

Intra-pair Level Exchange two customers of a truck route

Exchange two customers of routes of a truck-drone

Exchange truck and drone nodes in different truck-

Update the current solution if it is improved after

Improve the current solution using 2-opt algorithm

Fig. 3. Flowchart of ILS for TDHRP-TDRTT.

eij + ejk ⩽R, ∀i, k ∈ B, ∀j ∈ Nd− (11)

ai ⩽τi ⩽bi , ∀i ∈ N (12)

xtpij ∈ {0, 1}, ∀p ∈ P, (i, j, t) ∈ A (13)

ypijk ∈ {0, 1}, ∀p ∈ P, ∀i, k ∈ N, ∀j ∈ N\Nd− (14)

4. Iterated local search heuristic

4.1. Time window preprocessing

12 Remove j and k from N(ρ), and record the partial solution ρ .

13 If the node number in ρ − ρ′ is smaller than or equal to 2:

4.2. Method for generating Truck–Drone routes

The pair before local

The pair after shifting a 0 1 3 5 6 2 7 0

The pair after exchanging

The pair after

Customer node Customer node Drone arc Truck arc

Fig. 4. Local search at the intra-pair level.

4.3. Iterated local search

4.3.1. Local search at the Intra-pair level

Customer node Customer node

Fig. 5. Local search at the truck–drone inter-pair level.

4.3.2. Local search at the inter-pair level

4.4. 2-opt algorithm

Customer Node operated Drone arc Truck arc

Depot Customer node Drone arc Truck arc

Fig. 7. Illustration of the 2-opt algorithm.

Step 1: Randomly select a truck–drone route from the solution.

1 10 [1.0,1.1) 66.75 1800 0.00 % 66.75 18 0.00 % 0.26 %

5.1. Small-scale instances

5.2. Algorithm Comparison and analysis

5.2.1. Parameter tuning based on benchmark instances

R101-50 3339.93 500 3502.20 3468.80 3468.80 3468.80 3.86 %

5.2.2. Computation comparison

1 30 389.9 45 4 408.7 55 4 403.2 59 4 386.2 54 4

12 85 910.8 267 8 946.5 323 8 924.6 321 8 922.1 312 7

Transportation Research Part C 144 (2022) 103901

Cp Fixed cost of a truck–drone pair employed for delivery ¥320

Fig. 8. Spatial distribution of depot and customers.

1 106.551 29.564 0 [0, 150] 27 106.509 29.596 20.00 [10,85]

5.3. Case study

5.3.1. Data source

Fig. 10. Cost analysis between TDHRP-TDRTT and TDVRP.