In this paper, a two-echelon cooperated routing problem for the ground vehicle (GV) and its carried unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is investigated, where the GV travels on the road network and its UAV travels in areas beyond the road to visit a number of targets unreached by the GV. In contrast to the classical two-echelon routing problem, the UAV has to launch and land on the GV frequently to change or charge its battery while the GV is moving on the road network. A new 0–1 integer programming model is developed to formulate the problem, where the constraints on the spatial and temporal cooperation of GV and UAV routes are included. Two heuristics are proposed to solve the model: the first heuristic (H1) constructs a complete tour for all targets and splits it by GV routes, while the second heuristic (H2) constructs the GV tour and assigns UAV flights to it. Random instances with six different sizes (25–200 targets, 12–80 rendezvous nodes) are used to test the algorithms. Computational results show that H1 performs slightly better than H2, while H2 uses less time and is more stable.

Class imbalance ubiquitously exists in real life, which has attracted much interest from various domains. Direct learning from imbalanced dataset may pose unsatisfying results overfocusing on the accuracy of identification and deriving a suboptimal model. Various methodologies have been developed in tackling this problem including sampling, cost-sensitive, and other hybrid ones. However, the samples near the decision boundary which contain more discriminative information should be valued and the skew of the boundary would be corrected by constructing synthetic samples. Inspired by the truth and sense of geometry, we designed a new synthetic minority oversampling technique to incorporate the borderline information. What is more, ensemble model always tends to capture more complicated and robust decision boundary in practice. Taking these factors into considerations, a novel ensemble method, called Bagging of Extrapolation Borderline-SMOTE SVM (BEBS), has been proposed in dealing with imbalanced data learning (IDL) problems. Experiments on open access datasets showed significant superior performance using our model and a persuasive and intuitive explanation behind the method was illustrated. As far as we know, this is the first model combining ensemble of SVMs with borderline information for solving such condition.

The emerging working mode of coordinated trucks and drones has demonstrated significant practical potential in various fields, including logistics and delivery, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance, area monitoring, and patrol. The seamless collaboration between trucks and drones is garnering widespread attention in academia and has emerged as a key technology for achieving efficient and secure transportation. This paper provides a comprehensive and in-depth review of the research status on the routing problem for coordinated trucks and drones, covering aspects such as application background, cooperative modes, configurations, issues that have been taken into consideration, and solution methodologies.

Considering customer time windows, multiple trucks, each equipped with a multi-visit drone, are employed. For realism, the drone energy consumption and the impact of payload variation on the energy consumption rate are considered. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is developed to formulate the problem. A novel concept called “Segment” is introduced to promote the cooperation between trucks and drones. Based on this, a heuristic is designed where the drone and truck routes are constructed synchronously. The variable neighborhood search algorithm is integrated with simulated annealing to enhance solutions further. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated through both Solomon instances and practical cases.