PurposeThe purpose of this research is to reveal consumer preferences towards innovative last-mile parcel delivery and more specifically unmanned aerial delivery drones, in comparison to traditional postal delivery (postie) and the recent rise of parcel lockers in Australia. The authors investigate competitive priorities and willingness to pay for key attributes of parcel delivery (mode, speed, method and time window), the role of contextual moderators such as parcel value and security and opportunities for logistics service providers in the growing e-commerce market.Design/methodology/approachA survey involving stated choice experiments has been conducted among 709 respondents in urban Australia. The authors estimated panel error component logit models, derived consumer priorities and deployed 576 Monte Carlo simulations to forecast potential delivery mode market shares.FindingsThe study results suggest that people prefer postie over drone delivery, all else equal, but that drone deliveries become competitive with large market shares if they live up to the premise that they can deliver faster and cheaper. Both drone and postie become less attractive relative to parcel lockers when there is no safe place to leave a parcel at a residence, highlighting the importance of situational context and infrastructure at the receiving end of last-mile delivery. The authors identified opportunities for chargeable add-on services, such as signature for postie and 2-h parcel deliveries for drones.Originality/valueThe authors offer timely and novel insights into consumers preferences towards aerial drone parcel deliveries compared to postie and lockers. Going beyond the extant engineering/operations research literature, the authors provide a starting point and add new dimensions/moderators for last-mile parcel delivery choice analysis and empirical evidence of market potential and competitive attributes of innovative versus traditional parcel delivery alternatives.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Current and future space missions demand highly reliable on-board computing systems, which are capable to carry out high-performance data processing. At present no single computing scheme could efficiently tackle high-performance computing as well as reliability. This paper aims to address that gap. In the first part of the paper, a detailed survey of fault-tolerant distributed computing systems for space applications is presented. Fault types and performance parameters for assessment of a fault-tolerant system are introduced. Redundancy schemes for distributed systems are analysed. A review of the state-of-the-art on fault-tolerant distributed systems is presented and limitations of current approaches are discussed. In the second part of the paper, a new fault-tolerant distributed computing platform with wireless links among the computing nodes is proposed. Novel algorithms, enabling important aspects of the architecture, such as time slot priority adaptive fault-tolerant channel access and fault-tolerant distributed computing using task migration are introduced.

No abstract

No abstract

Autonomic managers are the main architectural building blocks for constructing self-management capabilities of computing systems and applications. One of the major challenges in developing self-managing applications is robustness of management elements which form autonomic managers. We believe that transparent handling of the effects of resource churn (joins/leaves/failures) on management should be an essential feature of a platform for self-managing large-scale dynamic distributed applications, because it facilitates the development of robust autonomic managers and hence improves robustness of self-managing applications. This feature can be achieved by providing a robust management element abstraction that hides churn from the programmer.In this paper, we present a generic approach to achieve robust services that is based on finite state machine replication with dynamic reconfiguration of replica sets. We contribute a decentralized algorithm that maintains the set of nodes hosting service replicas in the presence of churn. We use this approach to implement robust management elements as robust services that can operate despite of churn. Our proposed decentralized algorithm uses peer-to-peer replica placement schemes to automate replicated state machine migration in order to tolerate churn. Our algorithm exploits lookup and failure detection facilities of a structured overlay network for managing the set of active replicas. Using the proposed approach, we can achieve a long running and highly available service, without human intervention, in the presence of resource churn. In order to validate and evaluate our approach, we have implemented a prototype that includes the proposed algorithm.