A milk run distribution system design for hybrid usage of drones

The importance and unstoppable progress of the logistics industry in the world is increasing rapidly. The advancement of technology, the production of new vehicles, ideas and devices greatly affect the activities in the logistics sector. Drones are one of these vehicles and it seems that they are one of the main actors of the breakthrough developments in the logistics industry. Milk run distribution is one of the most important and well-known logistic systems. There are studies in the literature that include delivery models with drones in the milk run distribution system. The aim of this study is to reveal the benefit analysis of the proposed hybrid milk run model (HMR) against the classical milk run. While doing this study, a nonlinear mixed integer mathematical model was developed and converted to a quadratic model to reduce the difficulties of nonlinearity. Some of the problem-specific parameter values are taken from Özbilge (2021) but some of them are defined by us. The proposed HMR model is run on a numerical setting consisting of two truck operating and fuel costs, two opportunity costs, and two operating and battery usage costs for drone parameters and 10 customer locations for each. While taking these runs, the GAMS optimization program was used within the scope of the study. Our main finding is that delivery using drones with truck in hybrid milk run (HMR) distribution is 35.68% on average more beneficial than classical milk run (CMR) distribution in terms of costs in all problem setting.