Decision-making for drone services in urban environments: a simulated study on clients' satisfaction and profit maximisation

Drone services are expected to emerge in many parts of the world. Recently, drones research have been getting increasing attention as they involve increasingly advanced technologies that may lead to providing civilian drone services in cities. This paper studies, via extensive simulations, the impact of the number of drones available for drone service delivery, on the number of orders that can be served, profit generated, client's waiting time and client satisfaction, under the adaptive and committed modes of drone operation, and under two different modes of job allocation to drones. Our results also show that round-robin for job allocation is better than the serve-near as it can serve more orders, generate more profit, minimise client waiting time and maximise client satisfaction. The results from the adaptive and committed scenarios do not vary for the round robin system. However, for the serve-near system, the adaptive scenario is better on all fronts. These findings have implications for the drone service providers of the future.