Large-scale Package Deliveries with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using Collective Learning

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have significant practical advantages for delivering packages, and many logistics companies have begun deploying UAVs for commercial package deliveries. To deliver packages quickly and cost-effectively, the routes taken by UAVs from depots to customers must be optimized. This route optimization problem, a type of capacitated vehicle routing problem, has recently attracted considerable research interest. However, few papers have dealt with large-scale deliveries, where the number of customers exceed 1000. We present an innovative, practical package delivery model wherein multiple UAVs deliver multiple packages to customers who are compensated for late deliveries. Further, we propose an innovative methodology that combines a new plan-generation algorithm with a collective-learning heuristic to quickly determine cost-effective paths of UAVs even for large-scale deliveries up to 10000 customers. Specialized settings are applied to a collective-learning heuristic, the Iterative Economic Planning and Optimized Selections (I-EPOS) in order to coordinate collective actions of the UAVs. To demonstrate our methodology, we applied our highly flexible approach to a depot in Heathrow Airport, London. We show that a coordinated approach, in which the UAVs collectively determine their flight paths, leads to lower operational costs than an uncoordinated approach. Further, the coordinated approach enables large-scale package deliveries.