A Crowdsourcing Approach for Sustainable Last Mile Delivery

Abstract

Sustainable transportation is one of the major concerns in cities. This concern involves all type of movements motivated by different goals (mobility of citizens, transportation of goods and parcels, etc.). The main goal of this work is to provide an intelligent approach for Sustainable Last Mile Delivery, by reducing (or even deleting) the need of dedicated logistic moves (by cars, and/or trucks). The method attempts to reduce the number of movements originated by the parcels delivery by taking advantage of the citizens’ movements. In this way our proposal follows a crowdsourcing approach, in which the citizens that moves in the city, because of their own needs, become temporal deliverers. The technology behind our approach relays on Multi-agent System techniques and complex network-based algorithms for optimizing sustainable delivery routes. These artificial intelligent approaches help to reduce the complexity of the scenario providing an efficient way to integrate the citizens’ routes that can be executed using the different transportation means and networks available in the city (public system, private transportation, eco-vehicles sharing systems, etc.). A complex network-based algorithm is used for computing and proposing an optimized Sustainable Last Mile Delivery route to the crowd. Moreover, the executed tests show the feasibility of the proposed solution, together with a high reduction of the CO 2 emission coming from the delivery trucks that, in the case studies, are no longer needed for delivery.

SPADE 3: Supporting the New Generation of Multi-Agent Systems

“…In [40], a new approach to the LMD problem which considers a crowdsourcing solution was presented. This solution is based on an open fleet of temporary transporters who do not take a specific route to deliver each package from the customer's pickup point to the final destination, but on the contrary, they make use of their usual routes in order to carry a package, either to its final destination or to a point where another transporter can pick it up and continue with the delivery process.…”

“…Once the users register in the application by using their mobile devices, the system will be able to locate them in real time, and to share their current location to other users when necessary. From that moment on, whenever a customer issues a delivery request, a dynamic network analysis (explained in [40]) uses the fleet of geo-localized volunteers in order to calculate a particular path for delivering the goods to the customer's location. It is important to note that, in order to optimize each delivery, the system builds the complete delivery path as a chain of collaborative deliverers (the volunteers) in which each volunteer carries the package over some part of the path (a sub-path) and then passes it to the next volunteer.…”

“…• Planner agent: this agent is in charge of computing optimized delivery paths, given the pending deliveries and the volunteers' habitual routes, and then proposing such paths to the volunteers. In order to do so, this agent uses the crowdsourcing algorithm proposed in [40]. As an example, in Figure 5, the Planner has produced two delivery paths: one path for Volunteer 1 to directly deliver the goods to its customer, and another one with two sub-paths, where Volunteer 2 first transports the goods up to a point and then passes them to Volunteer 3, who finally delivers them to the customer.…”

Crowdsourcing Logistics Pricing Optimization Model Based on DBSCAN Clustering Algorithm

“…Stieger et al found in their research on the design of crowdsourcing incentive mechanisms that the key to motivating employees to complete crowdsourcing tasks is to create a suitable process incentive to guide users to participate [15]. Giret, aiming at the quality assessment of crowdsourcing results, proposed that the results could be evaluated from the four dimensions of novelty, flexibility, relevance and comprehensiveness [1].…”

“…In the logistics industry, crowdsourcing provides a new idea for the sustainable development of logistics enterprises, and reasonable distribution pricing is the key to the sustainable development of logistics enterprises [1]. Therefore, this paper attempts to establish an optimal pricing model for logistics crowdsourcing tasks.…”