A Cost-Optimization Model in Multi-agent System Routing for Drone Delivery

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have received attention in the last decade because of their low cost, small size, and programmable features. Drone delivery is one of the most promising applications to deliver packages efficiently. However, there are still doubts like "How to overcome the drone's limited capacity and battery life?". This paper will show a proposal to solve this problem by collaborating a drone delivery system with existing public transportation. A delivery system composed by UAVs and buses is a heterogeneous multi-agent system. This study will allocate the tasks to the UAVs and buses in the context of the multi-agent delivery system. Also, this work finds a path for each package by solving the vehicle routing problem (VRP) to find the cost-optimized path given the heterogeneous multi-agent system and minimize the number of UAVs needed for deliver. The experimental results show that the routing algorithm will reduce the total mileage and the number of UAVs given the same set of orders.