Parcel Delivery For Smart Cities: A Synchronization Approach For Combined Truck-Drone-Street Robot Deliveries

The past decade saw many novel concepts for last-mile delivery. Particularly interesting is the concept in which trucks dispatch - from designated points - drones or robots that do the actual delivery. Generally, the role of the truck driver is underexposed. This paper proposes a last-mile delivery concept in which a truck carries a mixed fleet of drones and robots, and where the driver also has an active role in the delivery process. Our aim is to efficiently align the service time required by the truck driver with the back-and-forth delivery times of the drones and the robots. To this end, we design a street delivery model using continuous approximation. We evaluate our approach using a flexible and reusable simulation model to enable tactical decision-making for logistics service providers to determine which neighborhoods are suitable for drones, street robots, or combinations, in terms of makespan and energy consumption.