Research explores truck–drone operations to speed up humanitarian aid delivery
A new study in the European Journal of Operational Research shows how trucks and drones can work together to deliver humanitarian aid more quickly after disasters.
The paper, co-authored by PhD student Hannan Tureci-Isik and Professor Melih Çelik from the University of Bath School of Management, together with former Bath lecturer and now Amazon research scientist Dr Ece Sanci, addresses a core challenge in disaster response: damaged or blocked roads often slow ground vehicles, delaying life-saving supplies.
In this setting, drones fly directly from depots to specific communities, while trucks follow road routes to visit multiple locations. Using drones alongside trucks helps bypass damaged or slow road segments, cutting long travel times on the worst-affected links.
Accounting for uncertainty
Depot locations play a crucial role in enabling an immediate and efficient response. Acting as supply hubs and launch sites for both trucks and drones, well-placed depots reduce delays once a disaster strikes.
The team developed a model that selects depot locations before a disaster while anticipating subsequent truck and drone routes, explicitly accounting for uncertain road conditions after a disaster. To capture the critical need for speed in the first hours and days, the goal was simple: minimise the average time it takes aid to reach each community.
Because solving such problems exactly is challenging for realistic cases, the authors designed a tailored method to find high-quality solutions efficiently.
Using instances based on the 2011 Van Earthquake in Türkiye, they found that trucks and drones beat truck-only responses, cutting the expected average arrival time from about 3.3 hours to 1.5 hours (≈55% faster), and that planning with uncertainty outperforms fixed, rule-based plans.
Beyond its academic contribution, the study offers practical guidance for disaster managers and policymakers. As drones become more common in logistics, this work shows how they can complement trucks to deliver aid faster and more reliably when it matters most.