This study focuses on optimizing a cooperative delivery system that combines a large-capacity but slow carrier and two fast yet capacity-limited unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The primary objective is to minimize the carrier’s total travel time while ensuring all delivery points in predetermined order are serviced by the UAVs. We formulate this problem with an emphasis on the flight patterns of the two UAVs. We propose a novel optimization approach that breaks down the complex problem into manageable subproblems by considering pairs of UAV flights. This decomposition enables more efficient computation and better scalability than a prior approach. Numerical experiments demonstrate that in a test instance with 20 delivery points, our method reduces computation time by over 90% and decreases the carrier’s travel time by approximately 40% compared to an existing approach. These results suggest significant potential for improving the efficiency of cooperative delivery systems, which can be applied to logistics and various vehicle coordination problems.
Yang et al. (2026) studied this question.