Cost Optimization of the Unmanned Aircraft Delivery System with Public Transportation

Miae Kim, Purdue University

Abstract

Drone delivery systems have been popular in recent days to reduce the cost of delivery, and many studies showed that the delivery cost is also a critical factor the customers consider. However, drone delivery systems have many limitations to commercialize because UAVs(Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have limited capacity, limited battery life, safety issues and government regulations. This paper focuses on saving the battery life of UAVs to make drone delivery systems feasible. The battery life of UAVs is hard to check since the battery is affected by numerous factors like weather, the weight of packages and velocity. This paper minimizes the total distance of UAVs travel which is one of the major energy factors to save energy. If a UAV can cooperate with existing public transportation, systems can save battery life and can deliver multiple packages simultaneously. On top of that, if the public transportation has charging panels, a UAV can even charge its battery while it takes the public transportation. This paper addresses the problem of \say{What if UAVs cooperate with the current bus systems? Given the destinations, which bus will UAV take and how to decide the destination to visit first? How many UAVs are needed to deliver the packages?}, By running a simulation with real bus data from CityBus and randomly generated destinations. This paper suggests several algorithms save the total cost of the delivery and shows two experiments to answer above questions. The first experiment shows that the effectiveness of the UAVs and bus co-operating by comparing the total distance of UAVs. The treatment group composed of UAVs and bus shares the destinations then optimizes the route(the order of the destinations to visit). The second experiment assumes that the drone delivery systems already have the optimal route and calculates the number of UAVs needed for the given routes. The result of the experiments shows that the drone delivery systems can save the total distance of the UAVs travel by cooperating with the existing public transportation systems. Then, the constraint of battery life and energy is reduced.

Degree

M.S.

Advisors

Matson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Computer Engineering|Computer science

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