Continuous approximation model analyzed by Iowa State University Institute for Transportation.
Nationwide, United States
Strategic Design for Delivery with Linked Transportation Assets: Trucks and Drones
Summary Information
The Iowa State University Institute for Transportation (InTrans), with the support of the Midwest Transportation Center (MTC) and the U.S. Department of Transportation Office of the Assistant Secretary (USDOT/OST-R), used a modeling approach to investigate drone-based package delivery. The goal was to derive insight into optimal models of combined drone-truck delivery. The combined use of drones and trucks to deliver packages is expected to reduce delivery costs, as drones may reach their destinations more directly and cost less to operate per mile than road vehicles.
Methodology
The study used continuous approximation (CA) modeling techniques to investigate the optimal configuration of drone-truck pairing for given arbitrary density of required deliveries. In this delivery method, trucks making deliveries launch drones with their own packages at one stop and recover them at another to be reloaded and relaunched.
The models were configured with various parameters, most notably:
- Drone operating cost per mile, ranging from $0.01 to $0.625, with estimated actual costs of approximately $0.07 per mile
- Different delivery stop costs for drones relative to truck delivery costs, ranging from -$0.20 (i.e., drone stops cost $0.20 less than a truck stop) to $0.10
- Different numbers of drones per truck, from 1 to 8
- Different densities of deliveries per square mile, from .01 to 500.
Findings
- The addition of a single drone working alongside a truck is estimated to provide a savings per square mile of delivery area of approximately $15.40, assuming an expensive drone cost-per-mile of $0.625 and a suburban or metropolitan density of package deliveries
- The savings per square mile increase along with density, growing up to $35.80 for a density of 500 deliveries per square mile
- Savings were also found to generally increase with additional drones, provided the operating cost per mile remained below approximately $0.50
- Using two drones working alongside a truck was predicted to result in savings per delivery of approximately 28 percent, ranging up to savings of approximately 40 percent for models using eight drones. These savings were computed relative to the delivery cost of a truck working alone.
