Impact of UAV Delivery on Sustainability and Costs under Traffic Restrictions

Abstract

Compared with traditional vehicles delivery, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) delivery can reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, which benefits environmental sustainability. Besides, UAVs can overcome traffic restrictions, which are the big obstacle in parcel delivery. In reality, there are two kinds of most popular traffic restrictions, vehicle-type restriction, and half-side traffic. We propose a mixed-integer (0-1 linear) green routing model with these two kinds of traffic restrictions for UAVs to exploit the environmental aspects of the use of UAVs in logistics. A genetic algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve the complex routing problem, and an experimental analysis is made to illustrate and validate our model and the algorithm. We found that, under both these two traffic restrictions, UAV delivery can accomplish deliveries that cannot be carried out or are carried out at much higher costs by vehicles only and can always effectively save costs and cut CO2 emissions, which is environmentally friendly. Furthermore, UAV delivery saves more cost and cuts more CO2 emission under the first kind of traffic restriction than that under the second.