Title: Multiple drone and truck combined operations

Authors: Bhawesh Sah; Mohammad Moshref-Javadi; Sung Hoon Chung

Addresses: D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA ' Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA ' Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA

Abstract: Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have the capability to improve the responsiveness in parcel distribution process, however, drone delivery suffers from shortcomings such as limited battery life, and weight-carrying constraints. These shortcomings can be overcome if a drone works in conjunction with a truck to make parcel deliveries. In contrast to earlier models which focus on one drone and one truck, in this paper, we propose a novel model in which multiple drones and trucks can work together to fulfil the logistics operations, a drone can depart from a truck and return back to the same or a different truck after completing the operations and a truck can house multiple drones. We present a mixed integer linear programming formulation of the problem and present results from several heuristics such as genetic algorithm (GA), simulated annealing (SA), and greedy search combined with the insertion method.

Keywords: drone logistics; last-mile delivery; unmanned aerial vehicle; UAV; transportation planning; optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2026.155580

International Journal of Operational Research, 2026 Vol.56 No.3, pp.269 - 289

Received: 19 Feb 2024
Accepted: 18 Apr 2024
Published online: 06 Aug 2026 *

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