A Review on the Truck and Drone Cooperative Delivery Problem

Abstract

As an emerging delivery style in logistics, the cooperation between trucks and drones can significantly improve the efficiency of parcel delivery, especially in some typical scenes, such as mountainous areas, high buildings, or post-disaster material delivery. In recent years, the truck and drone cooperative delivery problem (TDCDP) has attracted more and more attention from logistic research and commercial sectors. This paper proposes a taxonomy for TDCDP and systematically summarizes the related research. First, the impacts of changes in customers and environments on truck and drone delivery modes are analyzed in detail. Second, by using the proposed taxonomy, the delivery modes in TDCDP are classified into four types: parallel delivery, mixed delivery, drone delivery with truck-assisting, and truck delivery with drone-assisting. The roles of trucks and drones are analyzed in different scenes. Then, for different delivery modes, this paper summarizes the TDCDP models and analyzes the common assumptions, constraints, and objective functions. This paper also combs the exact algorithms, heuristic algorithms, and hybrid algorithms used to solve different kinds of TDCDP. Finally, the current research status and future research trends are discussed, and the challenges of TDCDP are highlighted.