Drone delivery logistics model for on-demand hyperlocal market

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hyperlocal delivery service is a digital platform business that receives on-demand orders from customers to deliver products from a local offline shop in logistics. Deploying drones/Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) on the hyperlocal market is still a relatively unexplored phenomenon and that demands attention on sustainable drone delivery strategies. This paper introduces both non-flexible and flexible drone delivery strategies for the hyperlocal market. Further, drone operational complexities like deciding a precise location for landing and take-off in congested cities, limited flight endurance, incorporating docking stations in drone routes and drone safe-return strategy are investigated. This problem is formulated as the Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model, which minimises the drone's total distance by the optimal energy consumption to complete the scheduled services. For practical feasibility, this paper focuses on heuristic solutions that effectively solve the problem efficiently and near optimally. The approach facilitates the operations manager to decide on an appropriate drone travel capacity based on service distance and the size of on-demand customers in an urban hyper-local logistics environment.