# Exact and Heuristic Approaches to Drone Delivery Problems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.01996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01996/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Vehicle Routing Problems for Drone Delivery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02305/) (2016)
- [On the Min-cost Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.01503/) (2015)
- [A Variable Neighborhood Search for Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03954/) (2018)
- [Matheuristic algorithms for the parallel drone scheduling traveling salesman problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02962/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem (FSTSP) considers a delivery system composed by a truck and a drone. The drone launches from the truck with a single package to deliver to a customer. Each drone must return to the truck to recharge batteries, pick up another package, and launch again to a new customer location. This work proposes a novel Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulation and a heuristic approach to address the problem. The proposedMIP formulation yields better linear relaxation bounds than previously proposed formulations for all instances, and was capable of optimally solving several unsolved instances from the literature. A hybrid heuristic based on the General Variable Neighborhood Search metaheuristic combining Tabu Search concepts is employed to obtain high-quality solutions for large-size instances. The efficiency of the algorithm was evaluated on 1415 benchmark instances from the literature, and over 80% of the best known solutions were improved.