A Model of Residential Mail Delivery by Drones
This paper proposes and analyzes a model of mail delivery in mid-size Canadian urban areas consisting of retrofitting current delivery trucks with a limited number of drones, which can be flown to a number of addresses in a given urban area. Such a truck
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Abstract This paper proposes and analyzes a model of mail delivery in mid-size Canadian urban areas consisting of retrofitting current delivery trucks with a limited number of drones, which can be flown to a number of addresses in a given urban area. Such a truck would then travel between specific locations (called truck-stops), where drone deployment would be executed from. The designated truck-stops are outputs of a proposed algorithm that uses delivery demand data and drone characteristics; they change depending on the needed delivery coverage on a given day. We discuss whether this delivery method could be used in different types of urban areas, where the time to delivery to customers can be shortened, as compared to classic door-todoor delivery. Keywords Mail delivery · Drones · Logistics of truck with drones · Time to delivery estimates
1 Introduction The progression of technology has led to the introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) also known as drones. Military drone applications are widely known, but numerous civilian applications have also been developed, and they include analyzing atmospheric conditions [5], search and rescue missions [9, 10], postdisaster assessment, environmental management, monitoring infrastructure development [11], image collection [16], traffic surveillance [7], and in proactive weed management [23]. The cost of drones and their power efficiency was also examined
M. G. Cojocaru (B) · E. W. Thommes · S. Gillies Department of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada e-mail: [email protected] E. W. Thommes e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 J. D. Pintér and T. Terlaky (eds.), Modeling and Optimization: Theory and Applications, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics 279, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12119-8_1
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in [8]. Amazon has introduced a new delivery method involving drones, Amazon Prime Air, guaranteeing the delivery of packages in 30 min or less [26]. Due to the various types of drones today, there have been developments in tools to decide which drone to use in a specific situation from a design state-space viewpoint [2]. The control systems of the drones advanced to become speech-based [22], as well as to incorporate sensors that eliminate the need to remote control them or to provide them with base stations [15]. These control systems are advanced enough to use marker recognition techniques (i.e., estimation of the distance between a marker and the drone by calculating area of recognized marker image), while remaining affordable [17]. Research has also been done to allow drones to have situational awareness during vertical flight [3]. In terms of drones delivering goods and packages, there has been some research done in the areas of path planning and networking. Path planning was studied in [18], using tracking control. Similarly, [14] studied path planning in large urban areas as a continuous space taking into account obstacles. Placement of charging sta
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