Abstract:

With the requirement for the protection of energy saving and emission reduction and also the development of the artificial intelligence, the city logistics distribution that uses unmanned aerial vehicle as distribution device has gradually turned into reality. Considering the battery capacity constraints of device, the charging decision and the pickup and delivery simultaneous demands, a mathematical programming model is constructed with the objective of minimizing the distribution cost (E-VRPSDP). A new branch-cut-and-price algorithm is provided to solve the exact solution based on the column generation method and bi-directional dynamic programming. To solve the large size E-VRPSDP, an improved simulated annealing algorithm is designed. A new operator is introduced as the constructing feasible solution operator which evolves the original solution into a feasible solution, thereby improving the searching ability of the algorithm. Finally, the suitable data examples are generated based on the standard test set to verify the proposed algorithms. The theoretical guidance and algorithm support for city logistics enterprises is provided to develop the driver-less logistics distribution.

Key words: vehicle routing problems, unmanned distribution, delivery and pickup simultaneous, branch-cut-and-pricing, simulated annealing