Research pick: Up, up and away, in my beautiful new drone - "Evaluation of factors affecting UAV selection in urban air logistics"

In the popular imagine, urban air mobility, also known as advanced air mobility, has long been about flying cars whipping people back and forth across cityscapes. However, the more immediate and realistic vision of emerging aviation technology is in logistics. Drones, formally known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are already being used to deliver goods, often in what is known as last-mile delivery; the most challenging and often the most costly final link in the supply chain.

Writing in the International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, a team of logistics specialists has looked at how businesses might choose to use UAVs. The research identified twelve criteria that might allow UAV logistics to really take flight. Some of these are technological in nature and others operational.

Technical considerations encompass the aircraft’s safety record, battery life, and efficiency, flight range, speed, levels of automation, and capacity for vertical take-off and landing in restricted environments. Operational concerns include cost, the security of transported goods, the use of onboard cameras, payload capacity, integration with tracking systems, and the safe handling of hazardous materials.

The researchers weighed up these competing demands using a mathematical decision-making method. This allowed them to assign an importance “weight” to each factor and then rank them all. The results highlight a clear hierarchy of concerns. Safety emerged as the most important criterion, reflecting aviation’s historic emphasis on risk minimisation. Cargo security is a close second, along with cost, flight range, and battery performance. Surprisingly, attributes often associated with efficiency, such as speed and payload size, were found to be of less importance. For logistics operators, the study suggests, safety, reliability and sustainability outweigh performance.

Such insights have implications for the design of future UAVs as well as for how logistics companies might use them. The bigger global delivery companies have already tested UAVs for short-haul deliveries. Manufacturers predict that UAVs could half delivery times and reduce costs by as much as 50 percent. We might see hundreds of millions of UAV deliveries each year by the 2030s.

Mercan, Y., Yavaş, V. and Can, D. (2025) ‘Evaluation of factors affecting UAV selection in urban air logistics’, Int. J. Shipping and Transport Logistics, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp.317–344.