Sustainable Facility Location-Routing Problem for Blood Package Delivery by Drones with a Charging Station

This paper proposes a multi-objective integrated facility location and drone routing problem in blood package delivery by considering sustainability factors. We seek to locate the predetermined number of capacitated launching facilities and charging stations for the drones’ battery. Candidate construction points are ranked by the TOPSIS method in terms of sustainability indicators. The objectives are to maximize the weight of selected points and the amount of demand coverage while minimizing the transferring and constructing facilities cost. Then, we assign drones to open launch facility and demand points to drones and launch facility. It should be noted that we consider the drone’s battery consumption, and if the drone battery is not enough to continue its mission, we assign them to an opened charging station. GAMS software is employed to solve small-sized problems. The solution result indicates the performance of our model.