| In recent years,the volume of express delivery services in rural areas has been rising sharply.However,in vast rural areas,the imperfect terminal delivery system restricts the development of rural express delivery.Especially in remote mountainous areas with complex terrain and poor basic road construction,the traditional truck delivery model is difficult to solve the problem of rural terminal delivery.The emergence of drones provides a new solution to the terminal delivery problem.Due to its advantages of low cost,fast speed and high efficiency,drone delivery has gradually become an important carrier of terminal express delivery but in practical applications,the endurance and load capacity of drone delivery are limited,and the economic benefits of only using drones for separate delivery are low.Therefore,in the design of the rural terminal express delivery network,this article adopts truck-mounted drones for collaborative delivery,which uses a truck with multiple drones to deliver express delivery to a group of rural customer locations to achieve more efficient express delivery services.Based on the summarization of the research status from different countries,this paper analyzes the feasibility of truck-mounted UAV collaborative delivery and combines the status of rural express delivery to build a terminal delivery network and process for truck-mounted UAVs.The specific delivery process is as follows: the trucks carrying drones start from the distribution center,follow the planned driving route to the first truck stop,and use drones to deliver to customers in the stop cluster.After all drones complete the delivery and return to the stopping point of the departure place,the truck will carry the drone to the next stopping point for delivery until all express delivery completed tasks and returned to the distribution center.This paper takes the rural express delivery of S Logistics Group in the Mengyin County of the old area of Yimeng in Shandong as a case background,takes into account the economic benefits of the enterprise,takes the lowest total delivery cost as the optimization goal,establishes a0-1 integer programming model,and designs a two-stage algorithm using to solve the problem according to the characteristics of the problem.First,I use K-means clustering to cluster a group of customers to determine truck stops,and then use genetic algorithm to solve the VRP problem under two different clustering strategies to determine the optimal driving route of the truck.I consider two different strategies for selecting truck stops: the first is to restrict truck stops to the customer’s location,and the second is to allow truck stops to appear anywhere in the delivery area.The case analysis results show that,compared with the traditional truck delivery model,the truck-mounted drone collaborative delivery model under two different clustering strategies can effectively reduce the total delivery cost and delivery time,which verifies that the effectiveness of collaborative truck-mounted drones delivery.Finally,through the sensitivity analysis of the initial K value and the maximum flight distance of the UAV,the optimal distribution plan is obtained to help the S Logistics Group in decision-making and planning process. |
