Impact of drone delivery on sustainability and cost: Realizing the UAV potential through vehicle routing optimization

Chiang, W.-C., Li, Y., Shang, J., & Urban, T. L. · 2019

citation-level

A widely cited formulation of drone delivery as a routing problem of carbon as well as cost. It is filed as a warning not to read a computational saving as a street measurement. The publisher's byline gives the second author as Yuyu Li.

The abstract says they present a mixed-integer green routing model and a genetic algorithm for last-mile drone delivery. From an extensive computational experiment they write that the results strongly support the claim that optimally routed drone delivery saves energy, cuts carbon, and is favorable on both cost and the environment.

What is supported is a claim on their model and their instances. The premises differ from Stolaroff and colleagues, who put extra warehouse energy at the center, and from Kirschstein, who found drone-only delivery heavy under urban density. Do not erase the premises and then average them. The tables were not recomputed for this card.