Coordinated Logistics with a Truck and a Drone

By J. Carlsson, Siyuan Song. Management Sciences, 2018

393 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We determine the efficiency of a delivery system in which an unmanned aerial vehicle UAV provides service to customers while making return trips to a truck that is itself moving. In other words, a UAV picks up a package from the truck which continues on its route, and after delivering the package, the UAV returns to the truck to pick up the next package. Although the hardware for such systems already exists, the extent to which such an approach can actually provide a significantly improved quality of service is not yet understood. By combining a theoretical analysis in the Euclidean plane with real-time numerical simulations on a road network, we demonstrate that the improvement in efficiency is proportional to the square root of the ratio of the speeds of the truck and the UAV. The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2824 . This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23a43524fd5168acfd589e919c143f49a6eeeac3

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In Automotive Engineering

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

An adaptive large neighborhood search metaheuristic for the vehicle routing problem with drones (2019, background): “Carlsson and Song (2017) show that the eﬃciency of the delivery system is proportional to the square root of the ratio of the speed of both vehicles.”
A Comparative Analysis of the Environmental Benefits of Drone-Based Delivery Services in Urban and Rural Areas (2018, background): “Carlsson and Song [22] also claimed that using drones along with the current delivery system could improve the efficiency of travel distance by a square root of the ratio of the speeds of a truck and UAV.”
Applications and Research avenues for drone-based models in logistics: A classification and review (2021, methodology): “…models (Wang et al., 2017; Othman et al., 2017; MoshrefJavadi et al., 2020), approximation algorithms using continuous approximation methods (Carlsson and Song, 2018; Campbell et al., 2017; Chowdhury et al., 2017; Li et al., 2020), and simulations of delivery models for dynamic environments…”
Optimization approaches for civil applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or aerial drones: A survey (2018, background): “Carlsson and Song [41] and Campbell et al.”