Revenue-Driven Scheduling in Drone Delivery Networks with Time-sensitive Service Level Agreements

Drones are widely anticipated to be used for commercial service deliveries, with potential to contribute to economic growth, estimated at £42 billion in the UK alone by the year 2030. Alongside air traffic control algorithms, drone-based courier services will have to make intelligent decisions about how to deploy their limited resources in order to increase profits. This paper presents a new scheduling algorithm for optimising the revenue of a drone courier service provider in these highly utilised time-sensitive service delivery systems. The first input to the algorithm is a monotonically decreasing value over time function which describes the service level agreement between the service provider and its customers. The second is the anticipated drone flight-time duration distribution. Our results show that the newly-developed scheduling algorithm, Least Lost Value, inspired by concepts for real-time computational workload processing, is able to successfully route drones to extract increased revenue to the service provider in comparison with two widely-used scheduling algorithms: First Come First Served and Shortest Job First, in terms of realised revenue.