TY - JOUR
T1 - Replacing urban trucks via ground–air cooperation
AU - Qu, Xiaobo
AU - Zeng, Ziling
AU - Wang, Kai
AU - Wang, Shuaian
N1 - Funding Information:
Xiaobo Qu is a Changjiang Chair Professor in Intelligent Transportation, Tsinghua University in China. His research is focused on improving large, complex and interrelated urban mobility systems by integrating with emerging technologies. To date, Prof. Qu has secured research funding well above 12 million Euros from the Australian Research Council, Swedish Innovation Agency Vinnova, STINT, and European Union. He has published over 140 journal articles published at top tier journals in the area of transportation. He is an elected member in Academia Europaea-The Academy of Europe since 2020.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - The advent of drones is leading to a paradigm shift in courier services, while their large-scale deployment is confined by a limited range. Here, we design a low-cost product that allows drones to drop parcels onto and pick them up from the roofs of moving passenger vehicles. With this, we propose a ground-air cooperation (GAC) based business model for parcel delivery in an urban environment. As per our case study using real-world data in Beijing, the new business model will not only shorten the parcel delivery time by 86.5% with a comparable cost, but also reduce road traffic by 8.6%, leading to an annual social benefit of 6.67 billion USD for Beijing. The proposed model utilizes the currently “wasted or unused” rooftops of passenger vehicles and has the potential to replace most parcel trucks and trailers, thus fundamentally addressing the congestion, noise, pollution, and road wear and tear problems caused by trucks, and bringing in immense social benefit.
AB - The advent of drones is leading to a paradigm shift in courier services, while their large-scale deployment is confined by a limited range. Here, we design a low-cost product that allows drones to drop parcels onto and pick them up from the roofs of moving passenger vehicles. With this, we propose a ground-air cooperation (GAC) based business model for parcel delivery in an urban environment. As per our case study using real-world data in Beijing, the new business model will not only shorten the parcel delivery time by 86.5% with a comparable cost, but also reduce road traffic by 8.6%, leading to an annual social benefit of 6.67 billion USD for Beijing. The proposed model utilizes the currently “wasted or unused” rooftops of passenger vehicles and has the potential to replace most parcel trucks and trailers, thus fundamentally addressing the congestion, noise, pollution, and road wear and tear problems caused by trucks, and bringing in immense social benefit.
KW - Drone
KW - Ground–air cooperation
KW - Parcel delivery
KW - Passenger vehicle
KW - Roof rack
KW - Urban truck
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85137618856&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.commtr.2022.100080
DO - 10.1016/j.commtr.2022.100080
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85137618856
SN - 2772-4247
VL - 2
JO - Communications in Transportation Research
JF - Communications in Transportation Research
M1 - 100080
ER -