A Look-ahead Search Method for Parcel Delivery Planning in Collaboration with Vehicle and Drone

A parcel delivery method combining a vehicle and a drone is proposed. In a parcel delivery business where delivery time windows exist, the delivery order is determined by considering both keeping the delivery time windows restriction and shorting the total delivery time. To solve this problem, firstly, an initial solution is obtained by looking ahead multiple route candidates and selecting the point that leads to the route with the largest number of packages that can be delivered during the specified time windows as the next destination. Then, the initial plan is successively improved. Through simulation evaluation, it is confirmed that the proposed method can increase the number of packages that can be delivered during the specified time windows and reduce delivery time compared to a method where an initial solution is greedily searched by using only next destinations' information.