On-Demand Grocery Delivery from Multiple Local Stores with Autonomous Robots

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
37 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The advances in the area of autonomous delivery robots combined with customers' desire for fast delivery, bare potential for same-day delivery operations, specifically with small time windows between ordering and delivery. Most same-day deliveries are operated using a single depot and with vehicles' routes planned and fixed when leaving the depot. In this paper, we relax these two assumptions and focus on on-demand grocery delivery using a fleet of autonomous vehicles or robots. The problem features the opportunity to pick up goods at multiple local stores or depots, for example, supermarkets within the city, and allows robots to perform depot returns prior to being empty, if beneficial. This allows for more agile planning and on average shorter distance to the next depot. We propose a novel dynamic method for the same-day delivery problem, where we aim to deliver orders as fast as possible, minimally within the same day. In each time step (every few seconds or minutes) the following is executed: For each order potential pick-up locations are identified and feasible trips, i.e., sequences to pick up goods and deliver orders, are calculated. To assign trips to robots an integer-linear program is solved. We simulate one day of service in a city under different conditions with up to 30 autonomous robots, 30 depots and 10,500 orders. Results underpin the advantages of the proposed method and show its versatility with respect to different situations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems, MRS 2021
PublisherIEEE
Pages29-37
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-6654-2926-9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event2021 International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems, MRS 2021 - Cambridge, United Kingdom
Duration: 4 Nov 20215 Nov 2021

Conference

Conference2021 International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems, MRS 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityCambridge
Period4/11/215/11/21

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

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