Doctoral Degrees (Industrial Engineering)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Industrial Engineering) by Subject "Ant algorithms"

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    An ant colony optimisation approach to scheduling truck and drone delivery systems
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-04) Tsietsi John, Moremi.; Grobler, Jacomine.; Kaminsky, Philip.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY: ‘Last mile’ logistic scheduling is a complex problem businesses are facing today. Competitive pressure has increased with technological growth. The speed of delivering parcels to customers can be an excellent source of competitive advantage, since businesses are facing the challenge of efficiently delivering parcels to customers on a daily basis. The use of delivery drones in conjunction with traditional delivery vehicles is a new highly promising research direction explored in this thesis. This dissertation proposes various truck and drone delivery system optimisation problems where a delivery drone is launched from a purpose-built truck, completes additional deliveries while the truck is en route between two customer locations, and intercepts the truck after completing the additional delivery. The dissertation describes the development of an ant colony optimisation algorithm used to solve the problem. More specifically, an ant colony system with k-means clustering was used in this research. Adaptive algorithm control parameters were also used to ensure an acceptable balance between exploration and exploitation throughout the search process. The algorithm was tested on drone scheduling benchmark problems, optimal solution and other population-based metaheuristics and compared against a truck only delivery system. It was shown that the truck and drone delivery system has a significant positive impact on delivery time performance.