86163ARRROWSClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKARRROWS, we believe, is a first. ARRROWS takes the best in road based route planning and combines this with optimised drone route planning to provide a multi-modal transport optimisation system designed to load balance the testing of COVID-19 samples across a target NHS Trust. Currently within our NHS partner COVID-19 samples are sent for testing at a range of Pathology Labs across their geographic region, serving a population of 750,000 patients and over 250 GP practices. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, all tests across the NHS Trust area have been sent to a main local hospital for analysis. This has swamped the pathology lab there and as such non-COVID-19 samples have been sent back to another local commercial pathology labb to load balance the pathology services across the trust. This has led to a significant increase in the amount of road transportation used to send samples from one lab to the other. To maintain the testing throughput has meant that this exchange of samples has led to some less than ideal situations resulting from laboratory operating times and courier availability. If a sample arrives at 4.59pm and makes the last courier, it will arrive for testing at the correct lab within 45 minutes. If it arrives at 5.01pm and the last courier has already left it must wait until 9.01am the next morning before it can be dispatched to the correct lab, adding an additional 16 hours before arriving at the right lab for testing. Working with our NHS drone flight partners, we have obtained Civil Aviation Authority permission to fly 3m wingspan drones between the pathology labs and by the time of this application's assessment we should be flying up to 6 round trip flights a day carrying 6kg of samples. The distance between the two main pathology labs is 20.2 miles taking 39 minutes each trip. Using the drones to fly the samples between labs saves 240 miles of road transportation a day, or 89.31Kg of CO2 per day; this then extrapolates up to 36.2 tonnes of CO2 annually. Using drones charged from solar has meant we have reduced the operational carbon footprint to zero. We are working with the trust to optimise COVID-19 testing across all of the trusts geographic area. We have identified an initial 10 further locations where we can operate drones from (according to the CAA's current risk apetite) but we need to undertake ARRROWS to work out the routing and optimisation to blend drone and courier transport to maximum effect and carbon reduction. We will use machine learning algorithms and monte-carlo simulations to calculate the optimal routing for both land/air journeys enabling us to create the optimal strategy for COVID-19 pathology processing with the lowest CO2 emissions practically achievable. This is innovative, as for the first time we are combining established land optimisation algorithms with our own drone routing operations, with the overarching aim of load balancing COVID-19 testing prior to the second wave, whilst reducing the carbon footprint as much as possible