Last Mile Drone Delivery: Complexity and Research Challenges
[EN] Drones or unmanned aerial vehicles technologies are experiencing a fast development pace propelled by a number of applications in diverse areas such as environmental monitoring, surveillance, military, smart cities, etc. In particular, the use of drones in smart city logistics is becoming incre...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) |
| Repositorio: | RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:dnet:riunet______::885c37004f330da6af34fc59ee8eacb8 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/235255 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Last mile delivery Drone routing problem Heuristic solutions Mixed integer linear programming Multi-objective optimization |
| Sumario: | [EN] Drones or unmanned aerial vehicles technologies are experiencing a fast development pace propelled by a number of applications in diverse areas such as environmental monitoring, surveillance, military, smart cities, etc. In particular, the use of drones in smart city logistics is becoming increasingly relevant to the services of transporting small goods in urban neighborhoods. Hereby, a real life use case is the last mile delivery, which consists in completing the final phase of product delivery process from a truck to the customer's house. Prior to last mile delivery, products are shipped in a truck from a distribution center to a location in a city, which becomes the starting point of the last mile delivery. A key issue in last mile delivery is the drone route planning in order to guarantee the correct and efficient delivery service. Although the drone route planning in last mile delivery shares similar requirements with route planning in other delivery systems, there are complexities and challenges due to new requirements specific to drones such as limited flying distance, product weights, energy consumption, fleet costs, etc. In this paper, we analyze the complexity and research challenges of drone route planning in last mile drone delivery. The limitations of exact optimization methods versus heuristic methods are also highlighted through Gurobi solver results. The paper contributes to understanding the complex multi-objective nature of the drone routing in last mile delivery. |
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