Commerce companies have experienced a rise in the number of parcels that need to be delivered each day. The goal of this study is to provide a decision-making procedure to assist carriers in taking a more significant role in selecting cost and risk-efficient truck-drone intermodal delivery routing plan. The congestion-based model is developed to select the method of parcel delivery utilizing a truck and a drone for optimizing cost and time. A study also has been conducted to compare drone-only and truck-only delivery routing plan. The proposed A* Heuristic algorithm and the OSRM application generate the travel path for drone and a truck along with the time of travel. Case studies have been conducted by varying the weight provided to cost and risk variable, studies indicate that there is a significant change in drone delivery travel time and cost with increase of cost weightage.

<p>  </p> <p>Hydrogen fuel cells are an abundant and cleaner source of energy, making them an attractive option for powering transportation systems. Hydrogen fuel cell drones are a new type of drone that generates energy from fuel cells for flight and expels heat and water vapor as byproducts. Compared to battery-powered drones, hydrogen fuel cell drones have better endurance and payload capacity due to their higher energy density, making them more efficient for eCommerce delivery. This research compares the performance of hydrogen and battery delivery drones for both drone-only and truck-drone last-mile delivery systems. A mixed integer programming model has been formulated to minimize the total delivery time for small to medium customer instances using the two-echelon vehicle routing problem, where drones are launched from the truck to serve one or more customers. The study conducted a comparative analysis by varying different parameters of drones on multiple sets of customer instances from real-world data to determine the best choice of drones for different scenarios. The results of the analysis show that hydrogen fuel cell drones have significant delivery advantages over typical battery drones in terms of delivery time and efficiency. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to demonstrate the impacts of different parameters on the objective function of the delivery systems.</p>

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