Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ahh but now you violate the cost assumptions of sequntially optimized delivery routes, exploding your fuel costs...a phenomenally bad idea. Tell me, are your delivery vehicles 10x more fuel efficient than a UPS van? Because that is the minimum range of efficiency that you'll have to acheive to make your plan viable, let alone cost effective. I'm not exaggerating either... you just added an entirely new dimension (del…
A UPS van sitting somewhere waiting is expensive because of the human inside. A driverless one costs nothing (except some refrigeration if applicable). Additionally residential have lower fuel costs for electric vehicles. It doesn't matter if the driverless vehicle takes 4 hours to deliver to an area when a UPS guy could have done it in an hour. Note that UPS costs come from having the human. They need larger vehicle…
I'm all for creative solutions to problems. Your solutions just aren't creative enough. Operations Research scientists have been working on this exact problem for well over four decades...UPS probably employs 1/3 of the logistics-specialized OR professionals in the entire world. Saying these solutions are simple, or just require a little bit more thought, is not much different from saying that proving P=NP is simple and requires just a little bit more thought. In fact, it is exactly like that.