Scheduling methods for unmanned aerial vehicle based delivery systems

The recent Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) testing will transform our daily lives. Because of the inherent flexibility, ease of use, and low cost to operate; UAV-based delivery systems will become tremendously popular in the near future. In this paper, we address the issue of cyber-physical scheduling of UAV resources in order to achieve an efficient delivery service. Particularly, to reduce the overall delivery time, we develop a weight-based scheduling scheme, which considers the priority and delivery distance of service requests. To maximize the probability of effectively handling service requests with a limited number of UAVs, we first formalize the problem as an optimization problem and then use a dynamic programming approach to solve the problem. Through a simulation study, our data shows that the service delivery delay and the probability of successfully handling UAV services requests can be significantly improved upon in comparison with existing baseline schemes.