Crowdsourced Delivery with Drones in Last Mile Logistics

We consider a combined system of regular delivery trucks and crowdsourced drones to provide a technology-assisted crowd-based last-mile delivery experience. We develop analytical models and methods for a system in which package delivery is performed by a big truck carrying a large number of packages to a neighborhood or a town in a metropolitan area and then assign the packages to crowdsourced drone operators to deliver them to their final destinations. A combination of heuristic algorithms is used to solve this NP-hard problem, computational results are presented, and an exhaustive sensitivity analysis is done to check the influence of different parameters and assumptions