Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Air-Ground Delivery in Urban System

📅 2026-02-13
📈 Citations: 0
✨ Influential: 0
📄 PDF

Technology Category

Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Planning/Scheduling and LearningHumans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior PredictionMultiagent Systems: Multiagent Learning

Application Category

Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic searchResponsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomyEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
📝 Abstract
Cooperative air-ground delivery has emerged as a promising logistics paradigm by leveraging the complementary strengths of UAVs and ground carriers. However, effective dispatching in such heterogeneous systems faces two critical challenges: i) the heterogeneity between flight and road dynamics, ii) the scalability bottleneck raised by the exponential decision variables in large-scale fleets. To address these challenges, we propose HRL4AG, a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning framework for cooperative Air-Ground delivery. Specifically, HRL4AG employs a high-level manager to tackle the scalability bottleneck by decomposing the joint action space, and mode-specific workers that encode distinct flight and road dynamics to address the heterogeneity. Furthermore, a novel internal reward mechanism is designed to guide the hierarchical policy learning, addressing the credit assignment problem in sparse-reward settings. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and an evaluation platform demonstrate that HRL4AG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the delivery success rate by up to 26% while achieving an 80-fold increase in computational efficiency.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

cooperative air-ground delivery
heterogeneity
scalability bottleneck
urban logistics
multi-agent dispatching
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Air-Ground Collaboration
Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems
Scalable Dispatching
Credit Assignment
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
💼 Related Jobs
No related jobs found.