"Delivery drones may become widespread over the next five to ten years, particularly for what is known as the "last-mile" logistics of small, light items. Companies like Amazon, Google, the United Parcel Service, DHL, and Alibaba have been running high-profile experiments testing drone delivery systems, and the development of such systems reached a milestone when the first commercial drone delivery approved by the Federal Aviation Administration took place on July 17, 2015. In the future, drones could augment, or even replace, truck fleets and could have important implications for energy consumption, public safety, personal privacy, air pollution, city noise, air traffic management, road congestion, urban planning, and goods and service consumption patterns in urban areas. To support developing issues in this domain, the RAND Corporation launched an exploratory study that brings together RAND's expertise in unmanned aerial vehicle operations, transportation research, systems analysis, and behavioral analysis and applies it to this emerging and underexplored research area. In this report, we provide a simple simulation of the total energy-use impact of shifting the most suitable (lightest total weight) 20 percent of the United Parcel Service (UPS) package delivery stops in Minneapolis from traditional UPS trucks to delivery drones. The reduced number of stops would allow for a smaller truck delivery fleet delivering to fewer service areas"--Publisher's description.

With the significant advance in battery and propulsion systems in recent years, drones represent the future landscape of urban logistic systems. Drone delivery is efficient and environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, this delivery method also suffers from low payload capacity and short flight range. In this dissertation, the author explores the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, into urban logistic combinatorial optimization problems. Specifically, this dissertation analyzes how the adoption of drones would improve the efficiency of the last-mile urban logistic system and how it can be used in specific scenarios such as post-disaster. This dissertation also explores how drones can deliver time-sensitive commodities such as food and medicine. By exploring the possibility of incorporating UAVs into the urban logistic system, this dissertation sheds some light on how this new technology will change people's lives in the foreseeable future

As the Internet continues to replace the brick-and-mortar store as the main place for purchasing goods, web-based companies are looking for ways to reduce the cost of delivering those goods. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs, is one delivery method that is increasingly being used. These UAVs can be programmed with delivery routes and destinations and can complete the job while requiring limited intervention from human controllers. Sense and Avoidance (SAA) systems have recently been incorporated into these UAVs so that they can detect objects in their flight path, reroute the UAV accordingly and operate even more autonomously. This is vital for delivery UAVs that are used within urban areas where the threat of objects along the flight path is the greatest. As a result of the low-cost and low-labor nature, UAV delivery service is expected to become a critical part of emerging smart city infrastructure.However, the use of SAA-capable UAVs may create another potential attack surface for cyber threats which may significantly hinder the broader adoption of UAV delivery services if not properly and sufficiently addressed. This research intends to provide a systematic study of this potential cyber challenge by uncovering the limitations of both UAV's SAA systems and the operational procedure of UAV delivery services that could be exploited in an attempt to disrupt orderly delivery services.This research starts with examining how an SAA system works and investigating its limitations. We then propose a tessellation-based analysis approach, using a typical urban scenario, to define a safe-operation zone for UAVs which help determine the optimal number of UAVs that can operate safely in an urban area in order to efficiently complete the potentially contentious delivery tasks. We will also discuss the inherent weaknesses of web-based logistic management systems that are used to program the routes and destinations into the UAVs. Next, we look at how an SAA system can be overwhelmed such that the UAV can effectively be "hacked" using a physical form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). Finally, we will examine ways that this form of DDoS threat can be mitigated in order to support larger scale adoption of UAV delivery services.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), popularly known as drones, have flown out of the pages of science fiction and arrived in Africa. A rush of recent research, pilot and exploratory activities have evaluated the technology and identified sectors where it can best benefit the people of the continent. Now it is questions of national policy that will determine how far drones will go.

Industrial revolutions have impacted both, manufacturing and service. From the steam engine to digital automated production, the industrial revolutions have conduced significant changes in operations and supply chain management (SCM) processes. Swift changes in manufacturing and service systems have led to phenomenal improvements in productivity. The fast-paced environment brings new challenges and opportunities for the companies that are associated with the adaptation to the new concepts such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber Physical Systems, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, cyber security, data analytics, block chain and cloud technology. These emerging technologies facilitated and expedited the birth of Logistics 4.0. Industrial Revolution 4.0 initiatives in SCM has attracted stakeholders’ attentions due to it is ability to empower using a set of technologies together that helps to execute more efficient production and distribution systems. This initiative has been called Logistics 4.0 of the fourth Industrial Revolution in SCM due to its high potential. Connecting entities, machines, physical items and enterprise resources to each other by using sensors, devices and the internet along the supply chains are the main attributes of Logistics 4.0. IoT enables customers to make more suitable and valuable decisions due to the data-driven structure of the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Besides that, the system’s ability of gathering and analyzing information about the environment at any given time and adapting itself to the rapid changes add significant value to the SCM processes. In this peer-reviewed book, experts from all over the world, in the field present a conceptual framework for Logistics 4.0 and provide examples for usage of Industry 4.0 tools in SCM. This book is a work that will be beneficial for both practitioners and students and academicians, as it covers the theoretical framework, on the one hand, and includes examples of practice and real world.