Investigation on the Last-Mile Delivery of Rural Logistics Under Crowdsourcing Transportation in China

Abstract

Recently, the last-mile delivery problem of rural e-commerce has emerged and became a bottleneck issue, due to the booming development of rural e-commerce which drives the vigorous growth of upstream agricultural products and downstream industrial products. This paper takes rural areas of China as a case study to discuss the last-mile delivery cost under crowdsourcing logistics. Owing to the absence of theoretical guidance on rural crowdsourcing logistics, the paper firstly intends to explore the theoretical framework of rural crowdsourcing logistics in terms of multi-level perspective (MLP). Then, the couriers' willingness coefficient is introduced to develop a mathematical optimization model containing time windows and vehicle capacity constraints, and the heuristic algorithm is applied to solve the model. The final results indicate that the transportation cost and Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) can be saved 23.85% and 37.38% respectively, compared with conventional rural logistics. Besides, analysis indicates that under certain conditions the approach of crowdsourcing delivery can be economically competitive and has valuable implication for unchoking the last-mile delivery problem of other similar rural regions.

Mogućnosti I Izazovi Dostave U Zavisnosti Od Tipa Naselja

“…Konačni rezultati studije [20] ukazuju da se troškovi transporta i dužina pređenog puta primenom CSH mogu smanjiti za 23,85% i 37,38% respektivno, u poređenju sa konvencionalnom ruralnom logistikom. Osim toga, analiza ukazuje da, pod određenim uslovima, CSH pristup može biti ekonomski konkurentan i uticati na otklanjanje problema dostave u ruralnim regionima efikasnom integracijom kretanja običnih ljudi i ruta dostave, dok obuhvata složenost postojećih problema kao što su ograničenja kapaciteta vozila, spremnost potencijalnih davaoca usluge za dostavu i vremenske rokove.…”