Drive, Pack, Fly: The Travelling Thief Problem with Drone

In collection operations, accumulating payload progressively slows the vehicle, imposing a cumulative penalty on routing efficiency. An onboard drone can offset this penalty by retrieving outlying items, thereby shortening the makespan and increasing operational profit. However, travel time remains load-dependent, and each item collected by the ground vehicle shifts the arrival times that govern the drone's launch and rendezvous points. This paper introduces the Travelling Thief Problem with Drone (TTP-D), which maximises the collected profit, net of a time-based rental cost, by jointly optimising item selection, vehicle routing, and flight synchronisation. We formulate a mixed-integer li...

<iframe src="https://silytics.si/embed/item/f07a8073-2748-4597-8eac-2e1d89d23861" width="420" height="190" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Silytics entry"></iframe>

Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.