Research on the Optimization of Rural Express Delivery Scheduling Based on the Truck-Mounted Drone Model

Affected by terrain limitations, scattered demand, and other factors, the difficulty of rural express delivery has become an urgent problem for the logistics industry to solve. In response, a truck-mounted drone mobile station model has been proposed. Firstly, a mixed integer programming (MIP) model is established to minimize the total transportation cost as the optimization goal; secondly, the K-means clustering algorithm is used to determine the take-off and landing points for the drones, and a hybrid particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to find the transportation routes for the truck-mounted drone model; finally, in simulation experiments, the proposed truck-mounted drone mobile station model has reduced the cost by 20.09% and time by 13.26% compared to the traditional truck delivery model.