
Transport is a logistics activity with the most unsustainable effects that challenge the economic, environmental and social sustainability of logistics systems and processes. The realization of goods flows is supported by numerous logistics activities (transportation, transhipment, warehousing, goods processing, order picking, etc.) whose inadequate planning can lead to serious unsustainable effects.
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In the field of logistics, a specific issue is how to achieve sustainable goods flow realization. In the last decades, the issues of sustainability and sustainable development attract much attention in expert and scientific domains. Additionally, numerical experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm for HDDP is superior to the comparison algorithms in terms of delivery time and delivery cost, and the impacts of three crucial factors are analyzed and some constructive conclusions are given. These three stages are iteratively optimized until the termination criterion is met. Specifically, at the first stage, a fuzzy c-means cluster algorithm considering the small drone’s payload is designed to cluster customers at the second stage, an improved variable neighborhood descent algorithm is developed to plan the route of the large drone at the third stage, the dynamic programming algorithm is adopted to plan the routes of the small drones. In addition, we design a three-stage-based iterative optimization algorithm to reduce the complexity of the HDDP. Third, the small drone is launched from the large drone and lands at the automatic airport. Second, the HDDP allows each small drone to deliver multiple parcels in a flight considering energy consumption according to its payload and endurance. First, the large drone does not directly deliver parcels, but rather launches small drones to deliver parcels. Based on this motivation, we study a new logistics delivery problem using heterogeneous multi-drone, namely, HDDP, where a large drone carries multiple small drones to distribution regions. Drone delivery could eliminate delivery delays caused by traffic lights and traffic jams on ground vehicles, and it can deliver parcels in case of road damage caused by natural disasters. With the rapid development of drone technology, logistics giants like Amazon and SF Express have applied drones to parcel delivery. The results indicate that CL concepts which combine different consolidation models and drones in the last phase of the delivery could stand out as a sustainable CL solution. The performances of the analyzed concepts are compared to the performances of the traditional delivery model – using only trucks without prior flow consolidation. Two of the analyzed concepts are novel, which is the main contribution of the paper. The goal of this paper is to analyze four CL concepts that differ in consolidation type, transformation degree of flow of goods (direct and indirect, multi-echelon flows), and the role of drones.

For several years, drone-based delivery has attracted lots of attention in scientific research, but there is a serious gap in the literature regarding the application of drones in CL concepts. Furthermore, technological innovations enable the implementation of modern vehicles/equipment in order to make CL solutions sustainable. The most analyzed and promising solutions are those that take into account cooperation among logistics providers and consolidation of the flow of goods. With the rise of city logistics (CL) problems in the last three decades, various methods, approaches, solutions, and initiatives were analyzed and proposed for making logistics in urban areas more sustainable. Computational experiments with randomly generated instances show the characteristics of the TSP-DS and suggest that our decomposition approaches effectively deal with TSP-DS complexity problems. We show that the model can be divided into independent traveling salesman and parallel identical machine scheduling problems for which we derive two solution approaches. Fundamental features of the TSP-DS are analyzed and route distortion is defined. The traveling salesman problem with a drone station (TSP-DS) is developed based on mixed integer programming.

We define a drone station as the facility where drones and charging devices are stored, usually far away from the package distribution center. In this paper, we propose a truck-drone system to overcome the flight-range limitation. Specifically, with respect to truck-drone systems, researchers have not given sufficient attention to drone facilities because of the limited drone flight range around a distribution center. However, the operational aspects of drone delivery services have not been studied extensively. The importance of drone delivery services is increasing.
