Papers › The flying sidekick traveling salesman problem with multiple drops: A simple and...
The flying sidekick traveling salesman problem with multiple drops: A simple and effective heuristic approach
Sarah K. Schaumann, Abhishake Kundu, Juan C. Pina-Pardo, Matthias Winkenbach, Ricardo A. Gatica, Stephan M. Wagner, Timothy I. Matis
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
We study the Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem with Multiple Drops (FSTSP-MD), a multi-modal last-mile delivery model where a single truck and a single drone cooperatively deliver customer packages. In the FSTSP-MD, the drone can be launched from the truck to deliver multiple packages before it returns to the truck for a new delivery operation. The objective is to find the synchronized truck and drone delivery routes that minimize the completion time of the delivery process. We develop a simple and effective heuristic to solve the FSTSP-MD based on an order-first, split-second scheme. The core component of our heuristic is a novel split algorithm that finds FSTSP-MD solutions in polynomial time for a given sequence of customers. We embed this split algorithm into a simple heuristic approach that combines standard local search and diversification techniques. The simplicity of our heuristic does not sacrifice performance: we show that it consistently outperforms state-of-the-art solution approaches developed for both the FSTSP-MD and the FSTSP (i.e., the single-drop case) through extensive numerical experiments. Based on both stylized and real-world instances, we also show that the FSTSP-MD substantially reduces completion times compared to traditional truck-only delivery systems. We provide extensive managerial insights into the impacts of drone capabilities and customer distribution on delivery efficiency. Our discussion compares the benefits of drones with greater payload capacity and those with greater speed. We highlight which service area characteristics increase savings but also require enhanced drone capabilities.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections