Abstract
Drone delivery is considered as one possible solution to the last-mile delivery problems arising from the growth of e-commerce and customer expectations. Besides, urban public transport allows accessibility and connectivity among various locations within a city. Merging these two transportation modes, we propose a new futuristic delivery concept called Drone Delivery using Public Transport (DDPT). DDPT allows drones to deliver packages by riding existing public transport vehicles and aims to resolve the problems of last mile delivery. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the new DDPT concept and investigate its potential by comparing it with the traditional mode of truck delivery. Accordingly, we develop four agent-based simulation models and conduct an initial simulation study with 36 cases by varying the number of packages and their inter-arrival times. The comparison analysis is based on four key performance indicators: (1) Delivery Service Level, (2) Average Delivery Time, (3) CO2 Emissions and (4) Utilization. The results indicate that the DDPT concept is more efficient and environmentally friendly than traditional delivery.
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Khalid, R., Chankov, S.M. (2020). Drone Delivery Using Public Transport: An Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation Approach. In: Freitag, M., Haasis, HD., Kotzab, H., Pannek, J. (eds) Dynamics in Logistics. LDIC 2020. Lecture Notes in Logistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44783-0_36
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