Multimodal Automated Last-Mile Delivery System: Design and Application

This thesis focuses on exploring the emerging automated technologies for last-mile on-demand food delivery as a new means of transportation to reduce congestion in urban areas. In order to achieve that 4 systems are designed and evaluated: Robot delivery system, drone delivery system and two hybrid delivery systems. Both hybrid systems are based on hub-spoke networks, Hybrid System 1.0 uses robots for phase one of the delivery and drones for phase two Hybrid System 2.0 uses drones for phase one and robots for phase two. To evaluate the efficiency of these systems, an in-house agent-based simulation model in MATLAB is developed for the City of Mississauga. 30 scenarios are tested differing in terms of demand and fleet size. The results show that Hybrid system 2.0 is the most efficient system of all four proposed due to the use of hub, customer waiting time and landing zones for drones.