Deploying drones for rapid pickup and delivery for on-demand customers in the hyperlocal market is unexplored in literature and demands attention. Maximizing customer pickup and deliveries with a limited drone flight endurance is essential but is hard to achieve in practice because of many service requests by on-demand customers. It mandates that drones cover extra mileage to visit docking stations in between services for recharge. Optimally allocating the services on available flight endurance and minimizing the docking station visits to complete all scheduled services is a predominant requirement for effective drone operations in a hyperlocal market. This problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model, and a heuristic algorithm is proposed to attempt various practical size problems, with near-optimal solutions reported. The paper offers valuable insights for practitioners and future researchers wishing to analyze the performance of drone operations and determine the appropriate number of drones required for the hyperlocal market based on service demand.
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