A New Vehicle–Multi-Drone Collaborative Delivery Path Optimization Approach

To address the logistical challenges of traffic congestion and environmental concerns associated with carbon emissions in last-mile delivery, this paper explores the potential of vehicle–drone cooperative delivery. The existing studies are predominantly confined to single-drone scenarios, failing to simultaneously consider the constraints of drone payload capacity and endurance. This limitation leads to task allocation imbalance in large-scale customer deliveries and low distribution efficiency. Firstly, a mathematical model for vehicle–multi-drone collaborative delivery with payload and endurance constraint (VMDCD-PEC) is proposed. Secondly, an improved genetic algorithm (IGA) is developed, as follows: 1. designing a hybrid selection strategy to achieve symmetrical equilibrium between exploration and exploitation by adjusting the weights of dynamic fitness–distance balance, greedy selection, and random selection; and 2. introducing the local search operator composed of gene sequence reversal, single-gene slide-down, and random half-swap to improve the neighborhood quality solution mining efficiency. Finally, the experimental results show that compared with a traditional genetic algorithm (GA) and adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS), the IGA requires less time to find solutions in various test cases and reduces the average cost of the optimal solution by up to 30%. In addition, an analysis of drone payload sensitivity showed that drone payload capacity is negatively correlated with delivery time, and that larger customer sizes corresponded to higher sensitivity.