Abstract
Rural communities face persistent challenges in accessing timely and reliable medical supply delivery due to sparse infrastructure, long travel distances, and limited healthcare resources. This study presents a weather-aware, multi-modal optimization framework for operational-level medical delivery in rural regions using drones and ground vehicles. The proposed model jointly integrates routing and scheduling decisions with transshipment, recharging operations, and spatiotemporal energy consumption derived from forecast-based weather information, enabling operationally realistic planning under environmental and infrastructure constraints. Computational experiments based on real-world data from the Shield Illinois testing program evaluate instances across four operating scenarios that vary in demand volume and spatial dispersion. Relative to decentralized ground-based delivery, centralized optimization of ground vehicle routing alone reduces total system cost by 40–83%. Incorporating drone-ground coordination yields an additional 38–62% cost reduction, while drone-enabled configurations reduce weighted average delivery time by up to 85% and CO2 emissions by more than 99%. High-volume scenarios favor drone-only operation due to parallel point-to-point service and sufficient fleet capacity, whereas low-volume but spatially dispersed networks benefit from multi-modal coordination through reduced travel distances and improved feasibility. The results demonstrate that spatial dispersion, fleet capacity, and energy feasibility, rather than demand volume alone, determine the operational value of multi-modality in rural medical logistics. The proposed framework provides a practical decision-support tool for energy-aware, weather-resilient planning in drone-assisted healthcare delivery systems. Compared to simplified range-based models commonly used in the literature, the proposed approach more accurately captures energy demands and enables better-informed routing decisions, offering a robust platform for navigating trade-offs between cost, timeliness, and network complexity in rural healthcare logistics.
Keywords: Scheduling; Routing; Multi-modal networks; Drone delivery; Weather-aware healthcare logistics