Impact of drone delivery on sustainability and cost: Realizing the UAV potential through vehicle routing optimization
By Wen-Chyuan Chiang, Yuyu Li, J. Shang, Timothy L. Urban. Applied Energy, 2019
329 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, offers the advantage of speed, flexibility, and ease in delivering goods to customers. They are particularly useful for tasks that are dull, hazardous, or dirty. Whether the use of drone delivery is beneficial to the environment and cost saving is still a topic under debate. Ideally, drones yield lower energy consumption and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, thus reducing the carbon footprint and enhancing environmental sustainability. In this research, we analytically study the impact of UAVs on CO2 emission and cost. We propose a mixed-integer (0–1 linear) green routing model for UAV to exploit the sustainability aspects of the use of UAVs for last-mile parcel deliveries. A genetic algorithm is developed to efficiently solve the complex model, and an extensive experiment is conducted to illustrate and validate the analytical model and the solution algorithm. We find that optimally routing and delivering packages with UAVs would save energy and reduce carbon emissions. The computational results strongly support the notion that using UAVs for last-mile logistics is not only cost effective, but also environmentally friendly.
Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f90b845574c265049c14542f3c0649f590dc844
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Citations in the corpus
- Applications and Research avenues for drone-based models in logistics: A classification and review (2021, background): “Chiang et al. (2019) evaluate the effects of using drones in tandem with traditional vehicles on reducing CO2 emissions and cost.”
- Last-mile delivery concepts: a survey from an operational research perspective (2020, background): “The only paper of this category explicitly considering the peculiarities of cargo bikes (and not just any multi-echelon routing task) is the paper of Choubassi et al. (2016). They tackle a routing problem with time windows in order to compare different types of cargo bikes, i.”