Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Journal of Systems Science: Operations and Logistics, cilt.12, sa.1, 2025 (SCI-Expanded)
This study introduces a variant of the drone delivery problem called the heterogeneous fleet drone delivery problem with lateness considerations. The problem considers a fleet of drones that differ in speed, payload capacity, and battery endurance, with the objective of minimizing the total lateness, computed by considering each customer's scheduled delivery time for all customers. Two mixed integer linear programming formulations are proposed to find the optimal solution of the stated problem. The mathematical models vary in the number of variables and constraints, and their effectiveness is compared using test instances generated in this study. In addition to the mathematical models, a metaheuristic algorithm based on modifications to the farmland fertility algorithm (FFA) is developed. This metaheuristic incorporates two local search methods with different encoding schemes. Comparative experiments indicate that the proposed Modified-FFA outperforms both the Classical-FFA and simulated annealing in solution quality. The results also show that local search methods with different encoding schemes exhibit distinct performances, highlighting the impact of encoding choices on efficiency. Furthermore, a comprehensive sensitivity analysis is also conducted to explore the effects of drone-related parameters, such as payload and velocity, on the total weighted lateness.