On a Mathematical Model for a new Drone Routing Problem

A new Drone Routing Problem for Delivery is studied. The problem considers a delivery system with a depot for a fleet of drones, a set of customers, and a set of facilities where the drones pickup products. An order from a customer could include several copies of an item or different items that the drone can support. Since the customer order could not be completed in one facility, more than one of these could be visited to complete the order. The Drone Routing Problem with Several Pickups in the Facilities (DRPPF) aims to satisfy customer orders by minimizing the makespan. An optimization model is proposed for the problem, a set of problem instances of different structures is created, and experiments are conducted with the model. The experiments illustrate the results by using CPLEX to run the mathematical model. A metaheuristic GRASP was implemented to obtain feasible solutions for larger instances.