IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/tprsxx/v59y2021i7p2140-2156.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Operating policies in multi-warehouse drone delivery systems

Author

Listed:
  • Yaohan Shen
  • Xianhao Xu
  • Bipan Zou
  • Hongwei Wang

Abstract

Drones are increasingly used to deliver packages with high efficiency in several areas. We study a multi-warehouse drone delivery system, considering the allocation rule that all warehouses share the drones and the allocation rule that each warehouse owns its drones. Both plug-in charge and battery swap strategies are investigated for battery management. We examine the random and closest drone to warehouse assignment rules, and design a heuristic to improve the drone to warehouse assignment rule. A closed queueing network is built to estimate the maximum throughput capacity and a cost minimisation model is developed for cost analysis. We validate the analytical model by simulation and conduct numerical experiments to analyse the operating polices. The results show that the closest drone to warehouse assignment rule outperforms the random drone to warehouse assignment rule when the number of drones is not large, and our heuristic can improve the throughput capacity by about 13.31%. The battery swap strategy provides a better throughput capacity than the plug-in charge strategy in most cases, while it needs more investment. Moreover, the shared allocation rule gives a larger throughput capacity than the dedicated allocation rule, and it reduces the operating cost by about 30.70%.

Suggested Citation

  • Yaohan Shen & Xianhao Xu & Bipan Zou & Hongwei Wang, 2021. "Operating policies in multi-warehouse drone delivery systems," International Journal of Production Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 59(7), pages 2140-2156, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:tprsxx:v:59:y:2021:i:7:p:2140-2156
    DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2020.1756509
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00207543.2020.1756509
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00207543.2020.1756509?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aditya Kamat & Saket Shanker & Akhilesh Barve & Kamalakanta Muduli & Sachin Kumar Mangla & Sunil Luthra, 2022. "Uncovering interrelationships between barriers to unmanned aerial vehicles in humanitarian logistics," Operations Management Research, Springer, vol. 15(3), pages 1134-1160, December.
    2. Chen, Wanying & Gong, Yeming & Chen, Qi & Wang, Hongwei, 2024. "Does battery management matter? Performance evaluation and operating policies in a self-climbing robotic warehouse," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 312(1), pages 164-181.
    3. Yi Li & Min Liu & Dandan Jiang, 2022. "Application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Logistics: A Literature Review," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(21), pages 1-18, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:tprsxx:v:59:y:2021:i:7:p:2140-2156. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/TPRS20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.