text: UAVs are increasingly being employed to carry out surveillance, parcel delivery, communication-support and other specific tasks. Their equipment and mission plan are carefully selected to minimize the carried load an overall resource consumption. Typically, several single task UAVs are dispatched to perform different missions. In certain cases, (part of) the geographical area of operation may be common to these single task missions (such as those supporting post-disaster recovery) and it may be more efficient to have multiple tasks carried out as part of a single UAV mission using common or even additional specialized equipment. In this paper, we propose and investigate a joint planning of multitask missions leveraging a fleet of UAVs equipped with a standard set of accessories enabling heterogeneous tasks. To this end, an optimization problem is formulated yielding the optimal joint planning and deriving the resulting quality of the delivered tasks. In addition, a heuristic solution is developed for large-scale environments to cope with the increased complexity of the optimization framework. The developed joint planning of multitask missions is applied to a specific post-disaster recovery scenario of a flooding in the San Francisco area. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions and the potential savings in the number of UAVs needed to carry out all the tasks with the required level of quality.
  @cite_3: Abstract Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), show high potential for parcel delivery. Drone delivery may be faster, less expensive, and more eco-friendly than traditional delivery modes such as trucks. Drones are not yet in commercial use, but many companies such as Amazon and Google have done pilot tests, and they will probably become common in the near future. Regardless of what companies decide, however, adoption intention among customers is vague. This study explores the factors affecting attitudes to drone delivery service and intention to adopt among 296 U.S. consumers by online survey. The results demonstrate that the relative advantages of speed and environmental friendliness, along with complexity, performance risk, and privacy risk, affect drone delivery adoption. Personal innovativeness also positively affects adoption intention. Furthermore, the results show that the determinants of drone delivery adoption differ according to the customer’s area of residence.
  @cite_11: Abstract Once limited to the military domain, unmanned aerial vehicles are now poised to gain widespread adoption in the commercial sector. One such application is to deploy these aircraft, also known as drones, for last-mile delivery in logistics operations. While significant research efforts are underway to improve the technology required to enable delivery by drone, less attention has been focused on the operational challenges associated with leveraging this technology. This paper provides two mathematical programming models aimed at optimal routing and scheduling of unmanned aircraft, and delivery trucks, in this new paradigm of parcel delivery. In particular, a unique variant of the classical vehicle routing problem is introduced, motivated by a scenario in which an unmanned aerial vehicle works in collaboration with a traditional delivery truck to distribute parcels. We present mixed integer linear programming formulations for two delivery-by-drone problems, along with two simple, yet effective, heuristic solution approaches to solve problems of practical size. Solutions to these problems will facilitate the adoption of unmanned aircraft for last-mile delivery. Such a delivery system is expected to provide faster receipt of customer orders at less cost to the distributor and with reduced environmental impacts. A numerical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the heuristics and investigates the tradeoffs between using drones with faster flight speeds versus longer endurance.
summary: Several recent studies have already investigated optimization strategies for drone-assisted delivery models (see @cite_3 for a literature review). In particular, variations of the Travelling Salesman Problem leveraging UAVs for last-mile delivery have been introduced @cite_11 .