The Traveling Salesman Drone Station Location Problem.

In this paper, we introduce the Traveling Salesman Drone Station Location Problem (TSDSLP). The TSDSLP exhibits features of the Traveling Salesman, Facility Location, and Parallel Machine Scheduling problems. More precisely, given a truck located at a central depot, a multitude of possible drone stations, and a set of customer locations, the TSDSLP seeks for a feasible routing of the truck and drone operations such that all requests are fulfilled, no more than a given number of drone stations is used, and the makespan (or operational cost) is minimized. We formulate the TSDSLP as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) and use the state-of-the-art solver Gurobi to obtain solutions for small- and medium-sized instances. Through our numerical results, we show that the utilization of drone stations might reduce the makespan significantly.