  The drone-based last-mile delivery is an emerging technology to deliver
parcels using drones loaded on a truck. As more and more autonomous vehicles
(AVs) will be available for delivery services, an opportunity is arising to
fully automate drone-based last-mile delivery. In this paper, we integrate AVs
with drone-based last-mile delivery aiming to fully automate the last-mile
delivery process. We define a new problem called the autonomous vehicle routing
problem with drones (A-VRPD). A-VRPD is to select AVs from a pool of available
AVs and to schedule them to serve customers with an objective of minimizing the
total operational cost. We formulate A-VRPD as an Integer Linear Programming
(ILP) and propose a greedy algorithm to solve the problem based on real-world
operational costs for different types of AVs, traveling distances calculated
considering the current traffic conditions, and varying load capacities of AVs.
Extensive simulations performed under various random delivery scenarios
demonstrate that the proposed algorithm effectively increases profits for both
the delivery company and AV owners compared with traditional VRP-D (and TSP-D)
algorithm-based approaches.
