Multi-Drone Parcel Delivery via Public Vehicles: A Joint Optimization Approach

As one of the promising self-powered sensors on Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted much attention for parcel delivery. Their high flexibility and low cost facilitate last-one-mile delivery. However, the limitations of battery capacity and payloads prevent drones from delivering independently over large scales. In this case, it is available to employ vehicles to assist the drones. The vehicles can be private-own trucks and vehicles in public transportation systems (PTSs). Compared to trucks, PTSs such as buses and trains do not require extra operating and fuel costs. Given these advantages, this paper adopts PTSs to assist UAVs in parcel delivery. Nevertheless, the fixed routes and schedules of public vehicles pose new challenges to the Routing and Scheduling problem for PTS-assisted Multi-drone parcel Delivery (RSPMD). To tackle the problem, we propose a novel routing and scheduling algorithm, referred to as the PTS-assisted multi-Drone parcel Delivery (PDD) algorithm. Considering the schedules of the public vehicles, the algorithm jointly optimizes the distance and time cost of drones by iteratively combining parts of existing routes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to address RSPMD in which UAVs ride public vehicles to deliver parcels in a wide area. Simulation results are finally presented to demonstrate that PDD outperforms existing solutions in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.