Modeling and Impact Assessment of Optimal and Dynamic Parking Management Systems and Hitchhiking Delivery Drones

 Increasing package delivery demand and limited logistics resources are creating challenges for cities seeking to alleviate congestion and externalities from delivery vehicles. This research explores several innovative potential solutions, specifically technology that optimizes the sequence of delivery vehicle parking and a novel “hitchhiking” operations concept for package delivery drones. In Chapters 2 and 3, this research investigates parking space schedule optimization through two modeling efforts, one which focuses on a system that receives all requests a day-ahead of time, and the second is a dynamic system that receives requests in real-time and periodically updates parking availability. Both of these studies see benefits from an optimized parking reservation system, but only under certain conditions. The best performance occurs when vehicle arrival time uncertainty is low and requests are received with sufficient lead time. When vehicle arrival uncertainty is high, however, parking schedules may require long buffers between reservations to accommodate late or early arrivals. Adding a buffer inherently reduces the time available for scheduling delivery vehicles and can result in more unscheduled vehicles than the first-come first-serve status quo. 

In Chapter 4, this research assesses another technology solution, hitchhiking drones, where a drone lands and transits on a public bus while en-route to the destination, through a comparative analysis of other rapid package delivery methods in San Francisco. Results indicate that for rapid delivery of a single package to a destination, hitchhiking drones provide a competitive balance between speed and CO2 emissions relative to alternative modes such as car, e-bike, direct drone-only, and recharging drone delivery. As a result, if delivery stakeholders can accept a slightly longer delivery time, then hitchhiking drones can remove delivery vehicles from roadway traffic and provide meaningful CO2 savings. 

Both of these technologies, parking space optimization and drone delivery strategies, are important potential components of urban logistics that can be beneficial and impactful when applied under the correct conditions. This research helps reveal the factors and conditions that make the technology the most competitive and which scenarios to avoid to prevent negative impacts