Modeling the Parallel Drone Scheduling Vehicle Routing Problem as a Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem

Drones are currently seen as a viable way for improving the distribution of parcels in urban and rural environments, especially while working in coordination with traditional vehicles like trucks. In this paper, we consider the parallel drone scheduling vehicle routing problem, where the service of a set of customers requiring a visit is accomplished by a fleet of trucks performing tours and a set drones moving back and forth from a single depot. In this work we propose a simple transformation that allows mapping the problem into a heterogeneous vehicle routing problem, which is a classic problem in the literature and for which an abondant collection of solving methods is available. We finally experimentally demonstrate how freely available softwares for the heterogeneous vehicle routing problem, such as Google OR-tools, can be used to obtained results comparable to those found by more complex methods especially tailored to the parallel drone vehicle routing problem.