Coordinated Logistics with a Truck and Multiple Sidekicks
研究了卡车作为移动母舰部署多个小型无人车（副手）进行最后一公里配送的方案，通过连续近似模型分析在大量需求点下系统总完成时间的改进，发现即使副手速度慢于卡车，只要数量足够多也能带来收益。
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]. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Naval Academy, Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.