Make Your Autonomous Vehicle Deliver And Earn Money for You

The drone-based last-mile delivery is an emerging technology designed to automate the delivery process by utilizing drones loaded on a truck to transport parcels to customers. In this paper, we study the next level of drone-based last-mile delivery where autonomous vehicles (AVs) without drivers are recruited to collaborate with drones to serve customers. We formulate the problem of selecting AVs from a pool of available AVs and scheduling them to serve customers to minimize the total cost as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP). A novel greedy algorithm is proposed to solve the problem that incorporates the real-world operational cost of AVs, traveling distances calculated based on Google Map API, and varying load capacities of AVs. Extensive simulations performed with numerous random delivery scenarios demonstrate that both the optimal and greedy algorithms significantly increase profits for the delivery company as well as the owners of AVs. Furthermore, the results indicate that the greedy algorithm is highly effective with a performance difference of only 2% compared with the optimal algorithm in terms of the total amount of profits.