The Development of an Optimal Operation Algorithm for Food Delivery Using Drones Considering Time Interval between Deliveries

These days, many attempts are being made worldwide to use drones for food delivery. Especially in the case of food, fast delivery is required, while maintaining its temperature and taste to the maximum. Therefore, using drones is suitable for food delivery because they can move through the air without being affected by traffic congestion. In this study, the purpose is to develop an optimal algorithm that can complete the delivery of customer food orders in the shortest time using drones. We have applied mathematical-model-based optimization techniques to develop an algorithm that reflects the given problem situation. Since the delivery capacity of drones is limited, and especially small, multiple drones may be used to deliver the food ordered by a particular customer. What is important here is that the drones assigned to one customer must arrive consecutively within a short period of time. This fact is reflected in this mathematical model. In the numerical example, it can be confirmed that the proposed algorithm operates optimally by comparing a case where the arrival time of multiple drones assigned to one customer is limited to a certain time and a case when it is not.