EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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630. Collision-free Trajectory Planning for Drones with Velocity Dependent Energy Consumption and Moving Piggyback Vehicles

Invited abstract in session WD-56: Last mile delivery with drones, stream Transportation.

Wednesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: S04 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Christin Münch
Mercator School of Management, University of Duisburg-Essen
2. Alf Kimms
Mercator School of Management, University of Duisburg-Essen, Campus Duisburg

Abstract

When drones are to be used in last-mile delivery, the limited drone flight range poses a major challenge. To mitigate this drawback, we allow the drone to be launched and recovered from moving trucks. Further, we allow for variable drone velocities, as the energy consumption and therefore the drone flight range is heavily dependent on its velocity. We consider one truck that launches the drone, and another one that recovers it. Both trucks drive along streets, and the launching and recovery can take place on any position along these streets. To synchronize the trucks with the drone, the departure times of both trucks are determined as well. Further, we incorporate obstacles that the drone must avoid, which may represent buildings, mountains, no-fly zones, or areas with a high probability of the drone being captured. We take on a geometric approach where the drone operates in the Euclidean space, and to the best of our knowledge, such a geometric viewpoint has not yet been adopted in a MILP for truck-drone last-mile delivery. Our MILP determines a collision-free trajectory for the drone in an environment with obstacles where the drone is launched and recovered by moving vehicles, such that the parcel is delivered as early as possible. The results of our extensive computational study, including the evaluation of three valid inequalities, prove the usefulness of our model, as even large instances with up to 300 obstacles can be solved within reasonable computation time.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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