The traveling salesman problem with multi-visit drone

Abstract

This paper deals with the Traveling Salesman Problem with Multi-Visit Drone (TSP-MVD) in which a truck works in collaboration with a drone that can serve up to q ≥1 customers consecutively during each sortie. We propose a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation and a metaheuristic based on Iterated Local Search (ILS) to solve the problem. Benchmark instances collected from the literature of the special case with q= 1are used to test the performance of our algorithms. The obtained results show that our MILP model can solve a number of instances to optimality. This is the first time optimal solutions for these instances are reported. Our ILS performs better than other algorithms in terms of both solution quality and running time on several instance classes. The numerical results obtained by testing the methods on new randomly generated instances show again the effectiveness of the methods as well as the positive impact of using the multi-visit drone.