Vehicle-drone collaborative distribution path planning based on neural architecture search under the influence of carbon emissions

Intelligent operation and green distribution have become a mainstream task to enable fast development of urban distribution applications. However, how to improve the distribution efficiency with low operating costs, and mitigate environmental pollution with high service quality is still a significant challenge in the practical industry applications. To address the above challenge, in this paper, we take into account both the economic cost and environmental cost, and propose a joint distribution path planning model based on neural architecture search (NAS) for electric vehicles with double-decked drones. More specifically, in our design, the factors such as energy consumption and carbon emissions of vehicles and drones during different distribution stages are considered. Then, a mixed integer linear programming model is established under the constraints of customer time window, vehicle capacity and vehicle battery capacity. Based on this model, a hybrid genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem, where the carbon emission cost is estimated by the convolution neural network model, which is optimized by the neural architecture search technique. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that, compared with CPLEX, the proposed method excelled in both solution quality and speed, which verify the effectives of our hybrid algorithm in dealing with the 2E-VRPD problem, where delivery routes can be well optimized, the efficiency of vehicle-machine collaborative delivery can be improved, and delivery costs are reduced.