Energy-Efficient Drone Logistics for Last-Mile Delivery: Implications of Payload-Dependent Routing Strategies
This addresses the environmental challenge of energy consumption in drone logistics for last-mile delivery, offering incremental improvements in efficiency.
The paper tackles the problem of energy-efficient drone routing for last-mile delivery by considering payload-dependent energy consumption, showing that energy-aware routing can lead to counter-intuitive strategies like longer routes or separate tours saving energy. In numerical experiments, this approach achieved energy savings in 67% of instances, with an average saving of 2.17% and a maximum of 5.97% compared to distance-minimization routing.
Drone delivery is rapidly emerging as a cost-effective and energy efficient alternative for last-mile delivery. Unlike ground vehicles, a drone's energy consumption depends on its payload in addition to travel distance. This creates a unique environmental challenge for multi-stop delivery tours, as the drone's total weight, and therefore its energy consumption rate, dynamically changes after each delivery. This paper investigates a novel green drone routing problem focused on maximizing energy efficiency. Through a series of motivating examples and numerical experiments, we demonstrate that energy-aware routing leads to several counter-intuitive routing strategies that contradict traditional distance-minimization delivery: a longer route may actually consume less energy than a shorter one; separate single-customer tours can be superior to a multi-stop tour; and a heterogeneous fleet, with drones of varying sizes, can achieve greater efficiency by matching drone capacity to specific delivery demands. In the numerical study, the green routing strategy shows energy savings in 67% of the instances. For these cases, the average energy saving is 2.17%, with a maximum saving of 5.97%, compared to minimum distance routing. These findings highlight the potential for green drone routing strategies to improve the sustainability of last-mile delivery.