The Vehicle Routing Problem with Drone for the Minimum $\text {CO}_2$ Emissions

Abstract

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), also called as drone, has developed fast in the civilian field. Not only it has high speed, low cost and no road restriction, but also it takes a positive role in $\text {CO}_2$ emissions. The drone’ s light total mass and the lithium battery that as the power producer make it has less energy consumption and $\text {CO}_2$ emissions. It could replace the truck to serve for some customers who need light parcels to reduce fuel consumption and time cost besides the influence to environment. However, for some heavy parcels, the truck is necessary to deliver. This paper assumed a situation that a drone and a truck delivering parcels in a route together, the aim is to find out the route that the vehicles produced the minimum $\text {CO}_2$ emissions through building a mixed integer liner model. And one of the drones’ warehouses of JD in Guang’an, Sichuan was chosen as the realistic example. The analysis resulted that the distance of the truck was the major decision element to reduce the total $\text {CO}_2$ emissions. In this case, the minimum total emissions are less 4.31 kg $\text {CO}_2$ than the emissions of the truck serving all nodes.