ExploringPublished 2026-10-22

The cost curve of drone delivery

Drone delivery is one of the fastest-rising topics in the operations research journals. Most papers optimise routes; few ask who pays, and how drones compare with vans as delivery density changes.

operations research logistics economics

What prompted this

"Drone delivery" climbs among the operations research keywords this year, next to "supply chain coordination" and "price competition". The economics journals barely mention it.

Questions

At what delivery density does a drone fleet beat vans on cost per parcel, once batteries, staff and regulation are priced in?
Who captures the savings: platforms, retailers or customers?
Do the routing models in the literature assume demand that real cities actually have?

Possible approach

Combine published routing models with public data on parcel volumes per district, and compare cost curves under a few regulatory scenarios.

Related research activity

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
Keyword	Papers, last 30 days	Rank	Papers, last 36 months
drone delivery	3	#776	107
last-mile delivery	14	#67	253
vehicle routing problem	0	–	0

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/cost-curve-of-drone-delivery.md

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). The cost curve of drone delivery. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 22, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/cost-curve-of-drone-delivery

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-cost-curve-of-drone-delivery,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {The cost curve of drone delivery},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/cost-curve-of-drone-delivery}},
  urldate = {2026-10-22},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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