Research on Vehicle Routing Problem in Urban Distribution Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In recent years, unmanned technology for logistics has gradually developed from the concept of laboratory to application. Unmanned transport equipment, represented by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), has entered the public vision with the development and test by many well-known logistics enterprises such as UPS and DHL. Compared with traditional vehicle distribution, UAV distribution is flexible and low-cost, while avoiding the last kilometer delivery problem caused by road traffic congestion or vehicle restrictions. In this paper, UAV is used as an auxiliary tool of the traditional distribution vehicle. The artificial vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles routing problem (AVUAVRP) is proposed, and a two-phase hybrid heuristic algorithm is applied to solve the problem. The effectiveness of the model and the algorithm is verified by a simulation example. The results show that UAV can effectively reduce transportation costs when it is used as an auxiliary tool in urban distribution under certain conditions.