Vertical Drone Delivery: A Multi-Depot VRP with Load-Dependent Energy Consumption

Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to modernize and transform the logistics industry. They are compact, highly mobile, economical to operate, and most importantly, have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than traditional means of transportation. As a result, they have the capability to navigate our increasingly congested cities with ease and thus propel us toward a more sustainable and environmentally friendly future. In this study, we develop an energy optimization routing model for vertical drone delivery with load dependent energy consumption in a multi depot setting. We solve a model problem and carry out numerical experiments to understand how different parameters affect the optimization model. Although energy optimization studies have been carried out for drones operating in horizontal planes, we were not able to find much literature about deliveries in vertical planes considering the gravitational penalty, which makes this study unique. Hence, this serves as a foundational investigation for further experimentation to be carried out in this domain. The paper also discusses a practical example in the form of a problem of a real-life application of this study.