Drone-assisted parcel delivery

Parcel delivery is becoming more and more popular as people buy a lot of products online. Innovative companies are therefore looking into other ways for their last-mile deliveries. In this paper we looked into the flying sidekick travelling salesman problem, where a drone can deliver parcels to customers apart from the truck. To give a more realistic approach, we incorporated the parcel weight into the flight endurance of the drone. This papers provides exact and heuristic approaches to solve the mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation of our problem. Furthermore, we will combine these two approaches to come up with a Warm Start Algorithm that gives us better solutions. Overall, we see that the use of drones is a valuable contribution to a delivery process, with an average reduction of 10.3%.