Reliable truck-drone routing with dynamic synchronization: A high-dimensional network programming approach

Within the context of burgeoning multimodal transportation systems, the emerging integration of drones and trucks is shaping the landscape of last -mile delivery. In this service -centric industry, uncertainty in travel time challenges the stability of delivery systems, highlighting the need for a more reliable and effective methodology. To tackle this challenge, we propose a reliable truckdrone collaborative routing problem enabling dynamic synchronization between trucks and drones in this paper. An integer programming model based on a space - time-state network has been developed to minimize the total travel time as well as their associated variabilities. Furthermore, to overcome the computational challenges for large-scale scenarios, a multidimensional -based hierarchical decomposition has been developed to identify a high -quality solution effectively. Numerical experimental results based on an illustrative network and a real -world network demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced algorithm. Our proposed methodology advances operational planning for truck -drone collaborative delivery by appropriately navigating unavoidable variations of travel time, shedding light on the broad development prospects of the multimodal transportation system.