Zero-Emission Delivery for Logistics and Transportation: Challenges, Research Issues, and Opportunities

Greenhouse gas, produced from various industries such as Power, Manufacturing, Transport, Chemical, or Agriculture, is the major source of global warming. While the transport industry is among the top three major contributors, accounting for 16.2% of global emissions. To counter this, many countries are responding actively to achieve net or absolute zero-emission goals by replacing fossil fuel with renewable energy sources. In response to this initiative, this chapter provides a systematic review of the use of zero-emission vehicles for a specific use case of package delivery. It first compares different green delivery systems that use unmanned aerial vehicles, electric vehicles, and fuel-cell trucks for certain weight categories. Specifically, a coordination of unmanned aerial vehicle and ground-based electric truck envisions a new paradigm of ground-based zero-emission vehicles where unmanned aerial vehicles can fly in the air beyond the visual line of sight empowered by future-generation wireless technologies. The integration of zero-emission vehicles for package delivery will encounter many challenges in analyzing, modelling, planning, and designing a green logistics system. This chapter investigates these challenges in the adoption of zero-emission vehicles with the existing research issues from a technical, environmental, economic, and political point of view. In addition, this study also sheds a new research perspective on artificial intelligence and integrated solutions for zero-emission deliveries.