A Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm For The Rural Green Traveling Salesman Problem With Drones

At present,drone delivery has preferably become the solutions to solve the last-mile distribution,among them,the ’truck + drone’ distribution model has gradually become the prevailing one in research.The long-distance travel ability of trucks enables the drones go further,and the flexible maneuverability of drones can also go to places beyond the reach of trucks.The deployment of drones has great potential in the Chinese rural areas which are sparsely populated areas.Advocating the green transformation of the rural logistics industry,and promoting the sustainable development of the rural e-commerce economy have pushed drone delivery into a research boom.Davis’ report1 pointed out that 80%-90% of the carbon emissions of enterprises originate from transportation.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the ’truck + drone’ distribution mode that can effectively promote the development of green economy in rural areas.This research mainly builds a joint cooperative distribution network of drones and truck,in order to minimize the carbon emission of the logistics network to the environment.According to the constraints of practical situation,and several basic assumptions and lemmas that conform to the actual operating situation are deduced according to the cooperative characteristics of drones and truck and the flight characteristics of drones during delivery services.Then mixed integer linear programming model is established.At the same time,an intelligent heuristic algorithm to solve the problem is designed.Specifically,the insertion operator of the local search algorithm and the selection,crossover and mutation operator of the genetic algorithm are improved according to the characteristics of the distribution problem,then the efficient hybrid evolutionary algorithm is composed(Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm,HEA).Lastly,computer simulations have verified the robustness and effectiveness of the HEA algorithm by using the data on the Google map collected from several villages and residential nodes near Yongsheng Town,Chengdu.At the same time,the ’truck + drone’ distribution mode and the traditional truck-only distribution mode are compared by the HEA algorithm respectively.The results show that: 1.The HEA algorithm can greatly reduce the target carbon emissions,has a good overall optimization effect and high effectiveness;2.The ’truck + drone’ mode is more environmentally friendly and has less carbon emissions that makes it suitable for application scenarios of actual distribution.All of these demonstrate that the hybrid distribution network has certain feasibilities and theoretical values for the development of rural green logistics and sustainable green economy.