Deployment of Charging Stations for Drone Delivery Assisted by Public Transportation Vehicles

To enable the drone delivery service in a remote area, this paper considers the approach of deploying charging stations and collaborating with public transportation vehicles. From the warehouse which is far from a customer, a drone takes some public transportation vehicles to reach some position close to the remote area. When the customer is unreachable from the position where the drone leaves the public transportation vehicle, the drone swaps the battery at a charging station. The focus of this paper is the deployment of charging stations. We propose a new model to characterize the delivery time for customers. We formulate the optimal deployment problem to minimize the average delivery time for the customers, which is a reflection of customer satisfaction. We then propose a sub-optimal algorithm that relocates the charging stations in sequence, which ensures that any movement of a charging station leads to a decrease in the average flight distance. The comparison with a baseline method confirms that the proposed model can more accurately estimate the flight distance of a customer than the commonly used model, and the proposed algorithm can relocate the charging stations achieving lower flight distance.