Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to make groundbreaking changes in the logistics industry. Leading logistics companies have been developing and testing their usage of UAVs recently as an environmentally friendly and cost-effective option. In this paper, we investigate how much the UAV delivery service is environmentally friendly compared to the traditional ground vehicle (GV) delivery service. Since there are fuel (battery) and loadable weight restrictions in the UAV delivery, multi-hopping of UAV is necessary, which may cause a large consumption of electrical energy. We present a two-phase approach. In Phase I, a new vehicle routing model to obtain optimal delivery schedules for both UAV-alone and GV-alone delivery systems is proposed, which considers each system’s restrictions, such as the max loadable weight and fuel replenishment. In Phase II, CO2 emissions are computed as a sustainability measure based on the travelling distance of the optimal route obtained from Phase I, along with various GV travel-speeds. A case study finds that the UAV-alone delivery system is much more CO2 efficient in all ranges of the GV speeds investigated.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a class of the emerging technologies that are expected to make groundbreaking changes in the logistics industry
Throughout phases I and II, we provide a quantitative analysis on eco-friendliness of the UAV service and suggest a future guideline to investigate the true sustainability of UAV logistics
We investigated how environmentally friendly UAV delivery service is compared to ground vehicle (GV) delivery service
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a class of the emerging technologies that are expected to make groundbreaking changes in the logistics industry. In this study, we compare the UAV logistic service with the one using general ground vehicles (GVs) to quantitatively analyze the sustainability of the UAV logistic service and answer the question about how environmentally friendly the UAV logistic service is. We compared the CO2 emissions generated to serve a set of customers using an UAV and a GV to quantitatively show how environmentally friendly the UAV logistic service is. To the best of our knowledge, observing UAV logistic services both economically and environmentally has rarely been investigated. We believe it is a significant step for the future of sustainable UAV logistic services
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