Reactive Composition of UAV Delivery Services in Urban Environments

TL;DR

This paper tackles the challenge of maintaining reliable UAV delivery in urban skyways by introducing a failure-aware reactive service composition framework. It formalizes a drone delivery service model, a skyway network infrastructure, and a system architecture that supports rapid local reconfiguration when skyway segments fail. Three local reactive algorithms—radius-based, cell density-based, and two-phased—are proposed to constrain the search space and recompose delivery paths under dynamic conditions, with extensive evaluation on real drone data and synthetic networks. The results show that the two-phased approach generally offers the best runtime efficiency and acceptable QoS trade-offs, suggesting practical viability for urban UAV delivery, while radius-based methods may be impractical in real deployments. The work advances practical, QoS-aware reactive routing for drone delivery in smart cities and highlights directions for incorporating weather and regulatory dynamics in future extensions.

Abstract

We propose a novel failure-aware reactive UAV delivery service composition framework. A skyway network infrastructure is presented for the effective provisioning of services in urban areas. We present a formal drone delivery service model and a system architecture for reactive drone delivery services. We develop radius-based, cell density-based, and two-phased algorithms to reduce the search space and perform reactive service compositions when a service failure occurs. We conduct a set of experiments with a real drone dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Figures (18)

• Figure 1: System Architecture for Reactive Drone Delivery Services
• Figure 2: Skyway Network Node Distribution
• Figure 3: Cell Density-Based Reactive Service Composition
• Figure 4: Rhombus Bounding Area Illustration
• Figure 5: Triangular Bounding Area Illustration