IT Infrastructure

Assignment Taken

Case Understanding

BCS Solution Summary

Solution

Service Provider Perspective:

A drone delivery service provider is typically an owner and operator of a fleet of drones that manages the delivery of packages to end consumers. A provider may be a warehouse that owns its own fleet to deliver its products. A provider may also be a shipping and logistics company like Amazon, Wing, and UPS. Here, we discuss some of the main benefits from a service provider perspective.

Labor efficiency:

A service provider mainly benefits from cutting costs and increasing profit. By using drones, delivery companies drastically cut down the cost of human labor. Unlike ground deliveries that require many drivers, one human operator can manage a fleet of drones. Human involvement will be required to monitor flights and perform maintenance tasks only. One employee would typically be able to monitor multiple flights at once similar to an air-traffic controller in commercial passenger planes. It is evaluated that the drone cost per package delivery is one-third or less of the UPS ground delivery cost.

Growing industry: A recent study estimates that drones could account for one-third of same-day deliveries by 2030. This growth will reflect on the profit of delivery service providers who are adopting the drone technology early. This rate has recently seen a boost since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Expansive testing and adoption of drone delivery systems was accelerated due to lockdowns, quieter skies, and need for contactless deliveries. The drone delivery service market is forecasted to grow at a significant compound annual growth rate of 14.5% between 2023 to 2030Service Consumer Perspective: A service consumer may be defined as the end customer who orders the packages. Alternatively, a drone-based service consumer may be called on warehouses, restaurants, and other beneficiaries who may utilize such services for the efficient shipment of their products. Here, we discuss some of the main benefits form a service consumer perspective.

Fast delivery:

1.Drones offer a faster delivery option of packages compared to terrestrial deliveries. Alphabet’s Wing flies at a speed of 113km/h ensuring the delivery of packages within minutes

2. Another example is Amazon Prime Air, their service aims to drop packages in less than 30 minutes.

3.This feature is especially significant for the delivery of emergency parcels, e.g medicine and defibrillators.

Cost effective: Using electric and autonomous drones for delivery can result in lower costs. These cost savings can be passed down to the end consumers through are diction in service prices. This cost reduction is mainly due to the cheap drone technology, and the ability to cover greater distances in shorter times, thereby saving fuel and cutting costs per mile. It is estimated that drones operational cost are at least 70% less than van delivery services.

SERVICE-BASED DRONE DELIVERY FRAMEWORK

A service-based drone delivery framework composes of four main components:

(1) the drones as the enabling technology of the service,

(2) the skyway network as the operating environment,

(3) the delivery mission types, and

(4) the service-oriented architecture of sensor-cloud infrastructure as the operation facilitator.

A. Enabling Technology

Drones are an enabling technology for service-based drone deliveries in smart cities. Delivery drones are generally categorized into one of three types based on their fabrication. Each of these types has its own pros and cons in terms of payload, flexibility, speed, flight range, battery, and takeoff and landing requirements.

• Multi-Rotor Drones: Multi-rotor drones are the most popular type of delivery drones. The most common uses of multi-rotor drones include aerial spraying, crowd monitoring, photography, and package delivery. These drones are preferred where hovering and vertical take-off and landing is required. In addition, the multi-rotor drones provide the ability to maneuver through tight spaces, e.g., high-rise buildings in urban areas. However, these drones have shorter flight times compared to fixed-wing drones. A multi-rotor drone with the payload weight typically stays in the air up to 25 minutes.

• Fixed-Wing Drones: Fixed-wing drones have similar configurations as passenger airplanes. These drones can carry larger payload weights and travel long-range distances at a fast speed. A fixed-wing drone can typically fly up to 45 minutes. The main limitation of a fixed-wing drone is its inability to hover in one place. In addition, it requires a dedicated runway to take-off and land.

• Hybrid Drones: Hybrid drones are a special type of drones that offer a combination of vertical take-off and landing from a limited space, hovering, and flight capabilities including long-range and high-speed. Hybrid drones are still in the early development stage. However, they are expected to dominate both military and civilian applications. Amazon has tested a hybrid drone which has both multi- rotor and fixed-wing characteristics to deliver packages.

Type of Delivery

Single Drone Delivery:

This section describes the utilization of a single drone for the provisioning of delivery services. In many instances, a single drone can satisfy the delivery requirements of customers. Delivery drones can carry packages weighing less than five pounds (2.27 kg) and cover about 86 percent of Amazon’s items. However, there are a number of operational constraints that hinder the potential deployment of single drone delivery services. The operational constraints for drone delivery services include the drone’s flight range, weather conditions, and availability of pads at recharging stations. The range of a typical delivery drone with full payload weight varies from 3 to 33 km. Therefore, a drone may need multiple times of recharging to serve long-distance areas. Service-based approaches have been proposed in recent years to address the aforementioned operational constraints in context of a single drone-based delivery. It is quite natural to model the drone delivery using the service paradigm because it maps to the key ingredients, i.e., functional and non-functional attributes. The drone delivery services usually operate in skyway networks where the composite services provide value-added benefits to the package delivery using drones. In this respect, a composite service represents an aggregation of a set of best drone services meeting the customer’s expectations in terms of delivery time and cost. A constraint-aware drone service composition approach ensures the selection and composition of drone services that avoid the congestion conditions at recharging stations. A robust service composition is proposed taking into account the uncertain weather conditions such as wind. To address the failures in drone services, a resilient drone service composition exists that is built upon the constraint-aware service composition. Service-Oriented Architecture of Sensor-Cloud Infrastructure A service-based drone delivery architecture is premised on the skyway network deployment. The architecture is made up of two primary parts: a service-oriented framework at its core and a sensor  infrastructure that serves as a technology enabler. We assume that the components of the architecture interact with each other through a hybrid approach of orchestration and choreography. Service providers, service consumers, and service registries are among the components of the service-oriented framework. The communication between services and clients is achieved with a message-based interaction protocol. Service orientation allows components to be loosely coupled, allowing some components to provide services while others consume those services. As illustrated in, drone delivery service providers register themselves and their services in the service registry. The registry is a database that is updated on a regular basis with information regarding various drone delivery services. The consumers use the service registry to search and invoke providers for required services. When a consumer invokes a service, the drone delivery management system assigns the delivery drone and decides the path to be travelled. The delivery management system makes use of a sensor-cloud infrastructure to provide low-power drones with server-level processing capability.

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES FOR SERVICE-BASED DRONE DELIVERY

In this section, we discuss the present approaches for service-based drone delivery in terms of path composition, aerial highways design, and Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems.

A. Drone Service Composition

Service composition techniques focus on finding an effective combination of atomic services [9]. Drone service composition approaches ensure congruent and effective provisioning of drone-based deliveries. In this regard, the composition of drone services is defined as the combination of various skyway segments served by a drone or a swarm of drones for the successful delivery of packages to the destination. In constrained multi-drone skyway networks, the drone service composition involves the selection of the optimal recharging stations in addition to the selection of best drone services for the delivery of packages. The service composition approaches based on single drone and swarm of drones pose a set of common challenges to address for the realization of effective delivery services. The common challenges during the composition process include the inherent drone limitations and environmental uncertainties. In addition to common challenges, compositions based on swarm of drones have their specific challenges to address. An example of a specific challenge is the formation of a drone swarm to serve a delivery request.

 B. Aerial Highway

 As the market for drone package delivery expands, de-livery drones will require smooth and dependable cellular communication. Thus, structured and connected sky routes are required. 3D airspace routes, similar to ground vehicle roads, should be established to safely and efficiently carry out delivery drone operations. These routes are intentionally planned at various altitudes based on predefined parameters (e.g., drone type, properties, and payload). Vertical pathways are also designed for smooth transitions and uninterrupted cellular coverage. The drones may be guided to fly in different routes based on the cargo priority level. A premium shipment, for example, can be delivered in less time by taking more direct priority routes. In a similar manner, urgent cargo may be given access to restricted aerial routes (No-Fly Zone). In addition, delivery drones would use the safest aerial routes in case of confidential cargo (e.g., official documents) to guarantee mission integrity illustrates a 3D aerial highway vision with drones operating at different altitudes.

Conclusion

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