Proceedings of the 2025 7th International Conference on Economic Management and Model Engineering (ICEMME 2025)

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Designing Resilient Drone Delivery Infrastructure: A Robust Facility Location Approach

Authors
Zhiqiang Niu1, Cui Cai1, Junbo Wang1, *, Jing Ye1, Mengfei Cao1, Sicong Li1
1Research Center of Logistics, Ministry of Transport Research Institute of Highways, Beijing, China
*Corresponding author. Email: 2628499925@qq.com
Corresponding Author
Junbo Wang
Available Online 13 March 2026.
DOI
10.2991/978-94-6239-602-9_35How to use a DOI?
Keywords
Drone delivery; UAV; robust; location
Abstract

Drone-based last-mile delivery is highly sensitive to demand uncertainty and constrained by limited battery capacity, making the strategic location of drone bases critical. This study proposes a robust facility location model that jointly optimizes facility siting, drone assignment, and customer allocation under these challenges. The model guarantees full service coverage and respects hard battery and capacity constraints for all demand realizations within a budgeted uncertainty set. Computational results on a 50-customer instance show that the worst-case total cost exhibits a stepwise increase as the uncertainty budget grows. This non-smooth cost behavior suggests that maintaining feasibility under higher uncertainty levels may require discrete adjustments to the infrastructure, such as opening additional facilities. Our approach provides a practical tool for designing drone networks that are both cost-effective and provably resilient.

Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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Volume Title
Proceedings of the 2025 7th International Conference on Economic Management and Model Engineering (ICEMME 2025)
Series
Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research
Publication Date
13 March 2026
ISBN
978-94-6239-602-9
ISSN
2352-5428
DOI
10.2991/978-94-6239-602-9_35How to use a DOI?
Copyright
© 2026 The Author(s)
Open Access
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Cite this article

risenwbib
TY  - CONF
AU  - Zhiqiang Niu
AU  - Cui Cai
AU  - Junbo Wang
AU  - Jing Ye
AU  - Mengfei Cao
AU  - Sicong Li
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/13
TI  - Designing Resilient Drone Delivery Infrastructure: A Robust Facility Location Approach
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 7th International Conference on Economic Management and Model Engineering (ICEMME 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 382
EP  - 390
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-602-9_35
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-602-9_35
ID  - Niu2026
ER  -