Landing-Type Aware Multi-Drone Route Generation for Last-Mile Delivery Service

Abstract

We consider the problem of generating delivery routes for multiple drones in the last-mile delivery service. In particular, the landing type - how a parcel is to be dropped off from a drone - is explicitly modeled in terms of the landing area and the landing time, which was not considered in other drone delivery works. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem is formulated to optimize the delivery route for each drone by minimizing the total delivery completion time. Our preliminary result shows that landing types affect the total delivery completion time significantly, even with a small number of drones. Therefore, it is necessary to explicitly consider the characteristics of landing types for more realistic delivery route generation of a large number of drones. © 2024 IEEE.