Analysis of future UAS-based delivery

Commercial use of Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) has the potential to reshape the delivery market and to open new business opportunities to small businesses, e.g., local stores, pharmacies, restaurants, as well as to large international and national businesses and government entities, e.g., Amazon, Google, UPS, power companies, and USPS. Simulation models can examine the value added to current business operations, the effects of radical shifts in current operations, and the formation of new types of businesses. This paper presents an envisioned future UAS delivery business operation models and develops a theoretical constructive simulation model. The conducted simulation analysis based on full factorial design estimated causalities between multiple independent and dependent business and policy factors e.g. drone velocity, flying altitude, number of drones, delivery demand, route type, maximum drone fly-time, number of orders completed, time average drone density, order time, drone utilization, and reachability of customers.