Congestion-Aware Bi-Modal Delivery Systems Utilizing Drones

With e-commerce demand rising, logistic operators are investing in alternative delivery methods such as drones. Because of their aerial reach, drones can provide much needed utility in the last mile by taking the load off of vehicles delivering parcels to customers on the road. Our goal is to assess the potential drones have in mitigating traffic congestion. To do so, we develop a mathematical model for a bi-modal delivery system composed of parcels carrying trucks and drones, combining it with an optimization problem that can be solved for the socially optimal routing and allocation policy efficiently. Within this formulation, we include multiple stakeholder perspectives by modeling the objective function in terms of both traffic congestion and parcel latency. This allows our model to quantify the impact of drones on reducing traffic congestion, and simultaneously finds the path routing that minimizes the given objective. To account for the effects of stopping trucks on road latency, we simulate roads shared between trucks and cars by utilizing SUMO. We then use quadratic optimization techniques to test our proposed framework on a variety of real-world transportation networks. Our findings highlight the trade-off between reducing traffic congestion and increasing parcel latency—while routing trucks along less time-efficient paths may alleviate traffic congestion, this disproportionately increases the parcel latency. This suggests the need for a balanced approach that considers both factors when solving for the routing policy.