A Literature Review of Drone-Based Package Delivery Logistics Systems and Their Implementation Feasibility

Taha Benarbia and Kyandoghere Kyamakya
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Taha Benarbia: Institute of Maintenance and Industrial Security, Industrial Engineering Department, University of Oran 2, Oran 31000, Algeria
Kyandoghere Kyamakya: Institute for Smart Systems Technologies, Universitaet Klagenfurt, Universitaetsstrasse 65, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: In recent years, e-commerce businesses have seen an increase in the daily volume of packages to be delivered, as well as an increase in the number of particularly demanding customer expectations. In this respect, the delivery mechanism became prohibitively expensive, particularly for the final kilometer. To stay competitive and meet the increased demand, businesses began to look for innovative autonomous delivery options for the last mile, such as autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles/drones, which are a promising alternative for the logistics industry. Following the success of drones in surveillance and remote sensing, drone delivery systems have begun to emerge as a new solution to reduce delivery costs and delivery time. In the coming years, autonomous drone sharing systems will be an unavoidable logistical solution, especially with the new laws/recommendations introduced by the Flight World Organization on how to organize the operations of these special unmanned airline systems. This paper provides a comprehensive literature survey on a set of relevant research issues and highlights the representative solutions and concepts that have been proposed thus far in the design and modeling of the logistics of drone delivery systems, with the purpose of discussing the respective performance levels reached by the various suggested approaches. Furthermore, the paper also investigates the central problems to be addressed and briefly discusses and outlines a series of interesting new research avenues of relevance for drone-based package delivery systems.

Keywords: autonomous drones; vehicle routing problem; drone-based package delivery system; drone charging station repositioning; drone routing optimization; e-commerce delivery; drone assignment; drone delivery modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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