The Freight Multimodal Transport Problem with Buses and Drones: An Integrated Approach for Last-Mile Delivery

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integrated bus and drone system for last-mile freight delivery, optimizing parcel transfers and drone flights to reduce costs and improve efficiency using advanced mathematical algorithms.

Contribution

It develops a novel mixed-integer linear programming model and a Branch-Price-and-Benders-Cut algorithm for the complex bus-drone delivery problem, with computational validation.

Findings

Proposed algorithms outperform CPLEX in efficiency and solution quality.

Achieve over 6% cost savings compared to sequential decision approaches.

Environmental and operational impacts of the integrated system are evaluated.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel freight multimodal transport problem with buses and drones, where buses are responsible for transporting parcels to lockers at bus stops for storage, while drones are used to deliver each parcel from the locker to the corresponding customer. The integrated bus-drone system synergistically expands drone service coverage using the bus network to ensure efficient final delivery. Minimizing the total operational costs while satisfying customer demands necessitates the joint optimization of parcel assignments and drone flights. We model the problem into a compact mixed-integer linear programming formulation and propose an integer programming formulation with exponentially many variables. To address real-world scale instances, we propose a Branch-Price-and-Benders-Cut algorithm for this non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP)-hard problem. This algorithm, integrating column generation and Benders decomposition within a Branch-and-Bound framework, is developed to obtain optimal or near-optimal solutions. Additionally, we introduce algorithmic enhancements aimed at accelerating the convergence of the algorithm. Computational experiments on instances generated from real-world bus data demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform CPLEX regarding both efficiency and solution quality. Moreover, our approaches can lead to over 6% cost savings compared to situations where we determine parcel assignments and drone flights sequentially. We evaluate the environmental advantages of integrating buses and drones, study the impact of different cost parameters in the system, and investigate the impact of the parcel locker configuration on performance. These findings provide valuable managerial insights for urban logistics managers, highlighting the potential of the integrated bus-drone system to improve traditional last-mile delivery.