Urban Logistics Drone Delivery Route Planning: An Application of Operation Research Towards Smart Cities

With the rapid development of urbanization and the popularity of e-commerce, urban logistics and distribution are facing many challenges. As part of smart cities, drone delivery provides new possibilities for solving these problems. This paper studies the urban logistics drone delivery route planning, and applies the operational research method to the field of smart city distribution. Firstly, a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model is proposed to maximize the lowest customer satisfaction and minimize the total cost. Then a genetic algorithm with matching mechanism is designed to solve the model. Further, the multi-objective mixed integer programming model of urban logistics drone delivery and the genetic algorithm with matching mechanism are applied to solve an urban logistics drone delivery numerical example. Finally, we show the results and findings of this study, and discuss their potential applications in the field of smart city distribution. Especially, to enrich the application of smart cities in operations research, we indicate the development direction of new technologies in the logistics industry.