Research Highlight 🔍
Rapid urbanization and increasing e-commerce demand worldwide are putting pressure on urban transportation systems, causing a notable rise in negative externalities such as traffic accidents, road congestion, and pollution. The use of diesel vehicles for intra-city deliveries significantly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, with last-mile deliveries alone accounting for up to 30% of urban CO2 emissions. Crowdshipping, which involves city residents fulfilling package delivery requests, is a rising concept that could significantly reduce these negative externalities.
In our study, we focus on a crowdshipping model where individuals incorporate package deliveries into their pre-planned trips, eliminating the need for dedicated delivery trips. Devising an efficient compensation mechanism is crucial in designing such a crowdshipping system to ensure its profitability and sustainability. In this context, our work introduces a dynamic compensation approach that considers the temporal and spatial characteristics of each delivery request to decide the compensation for potential crowdshippers. Temporal attributes refer to the remaining time available to deliver the package in order to meet service guarantees, while spatial attributes involve the package’s current location and destination.
Case Study 📦
We evaluated our dynamic compensation model for a case of Istanbul, a city with over 16 million residents and substantial daily passenger traffic. Our simulations suggest that crowdshipping with dynamic compensations has great potential to reduce congestion and pollution, particularly in densely populated urban areas.
Key Findings 📃
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Compared to traditional dedicated delivery services, the crowdshipping model with dynamic compensations can achieve over 36% cost savings, with city residents transferring nearly 56% of the packages.
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The optimized dynamic pricing scheme reduces costs by 11.4% and vehicle kilometers by 1.7% compared to a static approach that offers high compensations to attract crowdshippers. This is notable because it shows that a dynamic scheme can be more efficient and cost-effective than merely increasing compensation to boost participation.
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Allowing transshipments results in a 1.5% reduction in costs and a 3.4% decrease in vehicle kilometers compared to a crowdshipping setup without transshipments.
Our research highlights the promising potential of crowdshipping with dynamic compensation schemes to transform urban delivery systems. This innovative model can significantly reduce congestion, pollution, and costs, paving the way for more sustainable and efficient urban logistics.
