Assessment of Parcel Delivery Systems Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Résumé du livre

The idea of deploying electric vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, to perform "last-mile" delivery in logistics operations has attracted increasing attention in the past few years. In this paper, an electric vehicle travelling salesman problem with drone (EVTSP-D) is formulated as a mixed-integer/linear program to aid logistics organizations with a new method of delivering parcels which can extend the driving range of both vehicles, exploit their advantages and reduce the operation cost. An iterative heuristic algorithm with different search strategies is also developed, which can solve an instance with 25 customers. Results of numerical experiments show that the heuristic is much more efficient than ILOG CPLEX solver and incorporating UAVs into EV-based routing was found to reduce average delivery times by up to 40% for the instances tested. A real-world case study on the Austin network along with the sensitivity analysis of different parameters is also conducted and presented and the results indicate that UAV speed has a greater effect on delivery time compared to UAV operation limit and EV driving range.