A constructive heuristic for the heterogeneous drone delivery problem that considers packages' setups and battery capacity with the aim of minimizing weighted total waiting times of customers

Abstract

This article considers the heterogeneous drone routing problem, which takes into account the setup times of customers’ packages and aims to minimize the weighted total waiting times of customers. Cases where drones differ from each other in terms of battery capacity, carrying capacity, speed and load capacity have been handled. The battery capacity has been associated with the payload carried by the drone as long as it stays in the air. A constructive heuristic has been suggested and many test instances have been used to show how the efficiency of the algorithm changes when different priority values are used. As a result, it has been seen that good solutions can be obtained by assigning the light customer packages to the fast drones for the given test instances by using the suggested constructive heuristic.