Coordinated Logistics with a Truck and Multiple Sidekicks

One of the more novel recent innovations in the logistics world, both in theory and in practice, is the use of small autonomous vehicles to facilitate last-mile delivery. One particular scheme that has received considerable recent attention is the “sidekick” scheme, in which a large cargo truck acts as a mobile “host” that deploys smaller vehicles such as aerial drones or unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). In this paper, we develop a continuous approximation model that estimates the improvements to total completion time that such a system provides in the asymptotic limit as many demand points are drawn from a continuous probability distribution in the plane. Our key finding is that sidekick systems can be beneficial even when the sidekicks are slower than the host, provided there are sufficiently many of them.

Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Toyota University Research Program [ONR Grant N000142412277, DARPA Grant HR00112530234, and USC DOT Grant USC-DOT-913].

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