Energy-Efficient Drone Logistics for Last-Mile Delivery: Implications of Payload-Dependent Routing Strategies

TL;DR

This paper explores a novel energy-efficient drone routing approach for last-mile delivery, revealing counter-intuitive strategies and quantifying potential energy savings through numerical experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a green drone routing problem considering payload-dependent energy consumption, demonstrating strategies that outperform traditional distance-based routing.

Findings

Energy-aware routing can save up to 5.97% energy compared to distance minimization.

Longer routes may sometimes consume less energy than shorter ones.

Heterogeneous drone fleets can improve delivery efficiency.

Abstract

Drone delivery is rapidly emerging as a cost-effective and energy efficient alternative for last-mile delivery. Unlike ground vehicles, a drone's energy consumption depends on its payload in addition to travel distance. This creates a unique environmental challenge for multi-stop delivery tours, as the drone's total weight, and therefore its energy consumption rate, dynamically changes after each delivery. This paper investigates a novel green drone routing problem focused on maximizing energy efficiency. Through a series of motivating examples and numerical experiments, we demonstrate that energy-aware routing leads to several counter-intuitive routing strategies that contradict traditional distance-minimization delivery: a longer route may actually consume less energy than a shorter one; separate single-customer tours can be superior to a multi-stop tour; and a heterogeneous fleet, with drones of varying sizes, can achieve greater efficiency by matching drone capacity to specific delivery demands. In the numerical study, the green routing strategy shows energy savings in 67% of the instances. For these cases, the average energy saving is 2.17%, with a maximum saving of 5.97%, compared to minimum distance routing. These findings highlight the potential for green drone routing strategies to improve the sustainability of last-mile delivery.