Scheduling of a Parcel Delivery System Consisting of an Aerial Drone Interacting with Public Transportation Vehicles

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel parcel delivery system which consists of a drone and public transportation vehicles such as trains, trams, etc. This system involves two delivery schemes: drone-direct scheme referring to delivering to a customer by a drone directly and drone–vehicle collaborating scheme referring to delivering a customer based on the collaboration of a drone and public transportation vehicles. The fundamental characteristics including the delivery time, energy consumption and battery recharging are modelled, based on which a time-dependent scheduling problem for a single drone is formulated. It is shown to be NP-complete and a dynamic programming-based exact algorithm is presented. Since its computational complexity is exponential with respect to the number of customers, a sub-optimal algorithm is further developed. This algorithm accounts the time for delivery and recharging, and it first schedules the customer which leads to the earliest return. Its computational complexity is also discussed. Moreover, extensive computer simulations are conducted to demonstrate the scheduling performance of the proposed algorithms and the impacts of several key system parameters are investigated.

The The Application of Drones in City Logistics Concepts

“…In the paper [19], the authors analyze a different variant of cooperation between drones and ground vehicles where the purpose of drones is to resupply the ground vehicles during the delivery. The paper [35] analyzed the variant of collaboration between drones and public transportation vehicles in goods delivery.…”

“…Despite the problems caused by the changes in the nature of supply as one of the emerging technologies of the Logistics 4.0, have given the opportunity for the research to define various new and diverse CL concepts, yet there is no clear prediction of their impact on the future of the CL. Drones, as one of the autonomous technologies, have caused lots of enthusiasm in the existing literature, and are considered a promising technology in the future of goods distribution in urban areas [8].…”

Development of a Drone’s Vibration, Shock, and Atmospheric Profiles

“…The flight paths chosen were part of a study seeking to identify the potential of image collection for the detection of agricultural vegetation growth. The flight patterns and durations of service drones for delivery are likely to be much longer than collected here [22]. However, the research aimed to develop a methodology for which to generate test profiles based on field-measured data.…”

“…The vibration sampling frequency was set to 1600 Hz, and each sampled vibration period was determined to be 1.28 s for 2048 data points [20,21]. The flight patterns and durations of service drones for delivery are likely to be much longer than collected here [22]. However, the research aimed to develop a methodology for which to generate test profiles based on field-measured data.…”

Estimation and Control of Cooperative Aerial Manipulators for a Payload with an Arbitrary Center-of-Mass

“…Multirotor UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), which are highly maneuverable and can be made small, are gaining popularity as a major air transportation platform [ 1 ]. Among them, cooperative UAVs are widely exploited to handle a heavy or large payload [ 2 ] beyond the limits of a robot’s transportation capabilities.…”