Crowdsourced Delivery - A Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem with Ad Hoc Drivers

By Alp M. Arslan, Niels A. H. Agatz, Leo G. Kroon, Rob A. Zuidwijk. Transportation Science, 2016

438 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The trend towards shorter delivery lead-times reduces operational efficiency and increases transportation costs for internet retailers. Mobile technology, however, creates new opportunities to organize the last-mile. In this paper, we study the concept of crowdsourced delivery that aims to use excess capacity on journeys that already take place to make deliveries. We consider a peer-to-peer platform that automatically creates matches between parcel delivery tasks and ad-hoc drivers. The platform also operates a fleet of backup vehicles to serve the tasks that cannot be served by the ad-hoc drivers. The matching of tasks, drivers and backup vehicles gives rise to a new variant of the dynamic pick-up and delivery problem. We propose a rolling horizon framework and develop an exact solution approach to solve the various subproblems. In order to investigate the potential benefit of crowdsourced delivery, we conduct a wide range of computational experiments. The experiments provide insights into the viability of crowdsourced delivery under various assumptions about the environment and the behavior of the ad-hoc drivers. The results suggest that the use of ad-hoc drivers has the potential to make the last-mile more cost-efficient and can reduce the system-wide vehicle-miles.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Building and Construction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f5af3c1a1dae27d90b515de795fbc0982ecfab1

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Citations in the corpus

Supply, demand, operations, and management of crowd-shipping services: A review and empirical evidence (2019, background): “, 2015; Arslan et al., 2018). • Pricing Pricing is among the most important characteristics of crowdsourcing services. Existing studies proposed alternative methods to determine the most attractive pricing strategies for both requesters and driver-partners. Bidding is a common suggestion (Kafle et a”
A concise guide to existing and emerging vehicle routing problem variants (2019, background): “, crowdsourced deliveries (Arslan et al. 2019) or the physical Internet (Montreuil 2011).”