An Efficient Scheduling Scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Instant Delivery

As a convenient means of transportation, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can provide consumers and merchants with safe, efficient, and contactless instant delivery services. However, online orders are often concurrent, dynamic, and with time constraints in an instant delivery system. Therefore, it's important to optimally schedule the delivery sequence upon the UAVsystem. In this paper, we design a real-time UAV delivery scheduling model considering dynamic online orders. Through our instant delivery management system, the urban delivery network can be updated in real time according to order information. Considering the practical situation, customers with spatial diversity may produce orders with common order requirements, so we consider the overlap of UAV routes in the scheduling process. An order merging algorithm (OMA) is then proposed to improve the delivery efficiency (the ratio of the number of completed orders to the times UAVs visit stores) of UAVs. With the help of proposed system-level decision-making method, our system can meet real-time concurrent order demands across urban delivery networks. To evaluate the performance of system, we further carry out simulation experiments to verify the effectiveness of our scheme. Results show that the proposed UAVscheduling scheme improves the efficiency of UAV instant delivery.