Determining the Economic Viability of Driverless Home Delivery in the Hours of 1-5AM in New Jersey

Abstract

The goal of my thesis is to be able to determine which categories of delivery can be most profitable for an autonomous vehicle company starting out in final mile deliveries. When a company is starting out, it would need to obtain data to improve its Autonomous Vehicles and may be constrained by public policy, technology, weather or other factors. It would also need to be profitable as soon as possible for obvious economic reasons. It would be much easier to create profit and funding for future developments from within the company than by obtaining funding from a VC/PE fund. To do this, it must start out on a small scale with a category of deliveries which would be profit making while allowing it to generate data. It would then be able to eventually reach the stage where it is carrying out deliveries to a large scale audience, using a large fleet of cars and generating significant revenue. I was able to run an optimization model which incorporated the price, size, weight and distance of a set of packages ordered in the Robbinsville Area. My results showed that it is important to focus on delivering orders from the following set of categories: Groceries, Software and PC Games, Jewelry, Consumer Electronics. From this list, the overriding category a company must aim to focus on is Groceries.