Efficient route selection for drone-based delivery under time-varying dynamics

The use of drones can be a valuable solution for the problem of delivering goods for many reasons. In fact, they can be efficiently employed in time-critical situations when there is a traffic jam on the roads, to serve customers in hard-to-reach places, or simply to expand the business. However, due to limited battery capacities and the fact that drones can serve a single customer at a time, a drone-based delivery system (DBDS) aims to minimize the drones’ energy usage for completing a route from the depot to the customer and go back to the depot for new deliveries. In general, the shortest delivery route could not be the optimal choice since external factors like the wind (which varies with time) can affect energy consumption. Previous work has mainly considered simplified DBDSs assuming architectures with a single drone and with static costs on paths. Moreover, in these non-centralized architectures, the drones themselves compute the routes on the fly employing their onboard processing resources, making this choice costly. In this paper we develop a centralized system for computing energy-efficient time-varying routes for drones in a multi-depot multi-drone delivery system. Specifically, we propose a novel centralized parallel algorithm called Parallel Shortest Route Update (PSRU) that, over time, updates the drones’ delivery routes avoiding the whole recomputation from scratch. A comprehensive evaluation proves that PSRU is up to 4.5x faster than the state-of-the-art algorithms.