Logistics support for a delivery drone fleet

Troudi, A., Addouche, S.-A., Dellagi, S., El Mhademi, A. “Logistics support for a delivery drone fleet”, 2nd International Conference on Smart Cities, Smart-CT 2017; Malaga; Spain; 14 June 2017 through 16 June 2017, Volume 10268 LNCS, 2017, Pages 86-96. https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85020887649&origin=resultslist&sort=plf-f&src=s&st1=Drones++AND+deliver&st2=&sid=dfd90f7a89df9f7bf81cbae63504aeef&sot=b&sdt=b&sl=34&s=TITLE-ABS-KEY%28Drones++AND+deliver%29&relpos=18&citeCnt=0&searchTerm=

Summary

The article proposes a solution to regulate the drone delivery fleets in urban area. In this solution they look at what they call logistics support. The drones a company uses in their delivery fleet are placed in different categories depending on their characteristics, like vertical land/take-off UAV’s. In these categories are different regulation rule that should be taken into account when designing the logistics support. They state that delivery drones are used mainly for one-day or same-hour delivery and that is where they put their focus. The logistic support is a balance between life cost, performance and operational availability. And it helps the system to behave in a satisfactory way for all stakeholders, e.g. company and costumers. The logistics support provides support technology, maintenance facilities and supply support. An logistics support used in the military: In this system the UAV’s decides to which base it will return based on its health level(high, medium, low). Different bases have different facilities for supply and maintenance and work to do. Different Technical operation levels(TOL) are introduced to describe the task frequency and complexity, the amount of level depend on system. The type of drones, legislation, TOL, health level and environment of the applied drone fleet are used to develop an efficient system for the drones. How to decide on this system is described further in the article.