An adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the flying sidekick traveling salesman problem with multiple drops

Drones are the latest trend in commercial logistics research, especially in the context of last-mile delivery. Combining a drone and a truck offers numerous distinctive capabilities that introduce new opportunities to enhance the performance of the last-mile delivery system even further. To deal with the challenges of routing optimization for the combined system, the present paper proposes a new mathematical formulation and a new heuristic approach based on Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) for the Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem (FSTSP) with multiple drops (multi-drop FSTSP). The effectiveness of the proposed approach was demonstrated in several test instances, some of which are based on a real case delivery problem in Indonesia. It appears that the proposed ALNS approach performs better than the state-of-the-art method adapted from the previous literature.