Models and algorithms for the Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper presents a set of new formulations for the Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem, where a truck and a drone cooperate to delivery parcels to customers minimizing the completion time. The new formulations improve the results of the literature by solving to optimality several benchmark instances for which an optimal solution was previously unknown. A matheuristic algorithm, strongly based on the new models, is also discussed. Experimental results show that this method is able to provide good quality solutions in short time even for the larger instances, on which the mathematical models struggle to provide either good heuristic solution or strong lower bounds.