HYBRID DELIVERY SYSTEM: DELIVERY SCHEDULE OPTIMIZATION AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones have significant market potential benefiting from inherent flexibility, mobility, and cost savings. However, the mobility of the drone limited its battery capacity, which makes it impractical to perform delivery operations independently. The hybrid delivery system is getting attention to complement such weaknesses by incorporating another vehicle with the drone. Whereas the hybrid delivery system can selectively and synergistically exploit the strengths of these individual vehicles, they are challenging from an operational perspective since they require simultaneous cooperation between multiple components. In this study, we proposed two types of hybrid delivery: truck-drone and airship-drone systems. Each system has a high delivery capacity and timely delivery based on their complementary cooperation. The proposed systems are formulated as mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), which minimizes the delivery completion time and maximizes the revenue of the operator. A set of experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance and the capability of the developed model of the hybrid delivery systems. The results show that the hybrid delivery system has a distinct advantage over the existing delivery systems.