Modeling optimal drone fleet size considering stochastic demand

The last mile delivery is particularly challenging for stochastic deliveries with narrow time windows. This topic is timely due to the rise of e-commerce and courier type services and the impacts of fleet size and vehicle type on delivery costs. A novel contribution of this research is to provide an optimization approach, extending the newsvendor model, to provide an optimal drone fleet sizing solution with stochastic demand in terms of number of deliveries and deliveries weight or payload from one central depot. The solutions obtained are robust, as shown in a comprehensive sensitivity analysis.