Route planning and scheduling of unmanned aerial vehicle for multi-parcel postal delivery in Singapore

Abstract

Despite worldwide economic setbacks from COVID-19, e-commerce has catapulted in 2021 and is expected to be the dominant shopping method in future. Last mile logistics service providers in Singapore struggled with manpower and delivery fleet shortages amidst this surge in e-commerce purchases. Adopting UAVs to aid parcel delivery would potentially improve last mile efficiency and is hence explored in this project.

In this project, two systems of the multi-parcel UAV-Truck delivery framework were covered. In the first case, the delivery truck waits for the UAV to return to the same node after completing its delivery trip. In the second case, the UAV returns to a different destination node from its origin. Due to the limitations of UAV operating parameters, the parcels must first be sorted into bins to maximise the total weight of parcels carried in each bin. This was performed using the 1-Dimensional Best Fit Approach of the Online Bin Packing Method. Thereafter, each bin of parcels undergoes route planning via the Vehicle Routing Problem concept to optimise the delivery route taken by the UAV.

With the parcel scheduling and route planning algorithms designed, the results showed that the proposed delivery model could achieve 21% and 92% in cost and time savings respectively against currently practiced delivery methods in Singapore. This highlights the potential areas of growth in the last mile logistics industry and how it could alleviate the severe supply chain delays caused by mobility restrictions and manpower shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic.