Abstract: Based on the advantages of drone distribution, a regional collaborative distribution problem between drone and truck is proposed. Considering the situation that drone is used to distribute in sparse area and truck and drone cooperate in demand intensive area, due to the small load capacity of drone, the customer demand of drone access is allowed to be split. Combined with the access path relationship between drone and truck, a mixed integer programming model is established to minimize the transportation cost and the labor cost of using truck, and an improved variable neighborhood search algorithm is designed to solve the problem. The characteristic analysis of small-scale calculation shows that the transportation cost is sensitive to the load capacity and unit transportation cost of drone. The test results of several different scale examples show that the improved variable neighborhood search algorithm can effectively solve the cases of various scales in a short time, and the algorithm has a good stability.

Key words: drone, vehicle routing problem, split-delivery, collaborative distribution, improved variable neighborhood search