Policy Challenges for Coordinated Delivery of Trucks and Drones

The application of drone technology promises to revolutionize the transportation industry. Particularly, the combination of drones with ground vehicles has tremendous advantages for delivery applications, including an increased delivery speed and reduced operating costs, while keeping drones lightweight and small. Accordingly, the number of research studies targeting the Coordinated Delivery of Trucks and Drones (CDTD) has increased significantly in the past decade. Most of these existing studies, however, have put a strong emphasis on the optimization aspects, usually by solving combinatorial problems induced by the delivery coordination and the goal to minimize a specific objective function. Here, we contribute to the extant body of literature by providing a comprehensive review and discussion of policy-related challenges for a successful CDTD implementation. Given that various industry stakeholders, e.g., Amazon, Uber, and SF express, are already in the process of pushing the envelope for CDTD operations, we believe that our contribution is timely and complementary, helping policy makers to make informed decision regarding the support and regulation of this new technology.