Model construction and optimization of drone pickup and delivery in remote rural areas

Aiming at the problem of expensive and difficult delivery in the last kilometer of remote rural areas, this paper extends the vehicle path problem and proposes a new pickup and delivery path problem with the participation of Drones. Given a set of customers, suppliers, a warehouse and a fleet of drones of the same type, the aim is to find an optimal drone scheduling scheme so that the drones can serve the customers' orders from the suppliers. The article gives a multi-vendor pickup and delivery model (PDDRPTW) that considers the goods delivery time window constraints and the Drone usage power constraints. Meanwhile, the paper introduces a 30km radius, multi-drone, multi-supplier takeaway delivery example to verify the validity of the model, and also compares it with the traditional takeaway delivery model (based on the CVRPTW model) to show the superiority of the drone delivery model.