Research On Express Drone Dispatching Problem Based On Urban-Rural Transportation Considering Time-Varying Characteristics Of Traffic

The development of drone technology had made its application areas extend from military use to civilian and commercial use.Some domestic express companies had obtained drone aviation operation licenses issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China,and express drones were already in the formal business stage.Since most domestic express drones were currently used for rural e-commerce logistics,this article researched the scheduling of drones on the background of urban-rural logistics.In consideration of rural e-commerce logistics caused by high operating costs of rural express outlets and lagged construction of outlets,combined with domestic and foreign research on the "delivery vehicle+drones" distribution model,this paper proposed the "urban-rural passenger bus+drones" express delivery model for reducing the distribution cost of rural e-commerce logistics.At present,domestic and foreign researches on "delivery vehicle+drones"did not embody the time-varying characteristics of the road network traffic in the logistics distribution process.If this factor was not considered,drones and vehicle may not collaborate well on delivery tasks.Based on the previous researches,this paper comprehensively considered the time-varying characteristics of traffic,and researched the dispatching problem of urban-rural express drones for reducing the total cost of drone-vehicle distribution systems,then reduced the distribution costs of urban-rural logistics.The main work of this paper was as follows:(1)The express delivery mode of "urban-rural passenger bus+drones" was proposed.According to relevant domestic and foreign researches,a "passenger bus+drones" express distribution mode was proposed,and then the scheduling scheme and scenario assumptions of this mode were introduced to lay the foundation for establishment of the dispatch model and design of the solution algorithm.(2)The scheduling model of urban-rural express drones was proposed.According to the scheduling scheme and scenario assumptions,the scheduling problem was divided into three sub-problems:the routing problem of the drones,the scheduling problem of the drone fuselages,and the scheduling problem of the drone battery packs,then the scheduling model was constructed based on the sub-problems.(3)The two-phase heuristic algorithm was designed to solve the scheduling model of urban-rural express drones.According to the scheduling model and sub-problems,a two-phase heuristic algorithm was designed to solve the model.This algorithm consisted of an improved CW algorithm based on nearest neighbors and a dynamic programming heuristic algorithm.Finally,the numerical examples show that the model is rational and the algorithm is effective,which provides decision support for the express delivery scheme for rural logistics under the mode of "urban-rural passenger bus+ drones".