Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Last-Mile Delivery Considering Backhauls

Utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles for delivery service has been drawing attention in the logistics industry. Since commercial unmanned aerial vehicles have fundamental limitations on payloads and battery capacities, hybrid ground vehicle and unmanned aerial vehicle models have been actively investigated as practical solutions. However, these studies have focused on linehaul (delivery) demands, excluding a large number of backhaul (pickup) demands. If we consider both demands at the same time, an empty unmanned aerial vehicle that finished linehaul service can be immediately used to serve a backhaul customer. In this study, we investigate the differences that arise by considering backhauls as an additional element of the routing problem. A mixed integer linear programming model is developed, and a heuristic is constructed to solve large-scale problems. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we compare it to existing models using a real-world example. Our solution is also evaluated based on experiments employing a large number of randomly generated datasets.