Using taxis to collect citywide E-commerce reverse flows: a crowdsourcing solution

Abstract

International audienceThe popularity of round-the-clock online shopping urges the rapid growth of e-commerce, which substantially generatesadditional parcels for the distribution on the forward side. On the other hand, collecting the returned goods on the revereside is also increasingly becoming a preoccupation, particularly in the crowd and dense metropolitan areas. Inspired by theconcepts of Crowdsourcing and Physical Internet,we propose an innovative solution to collect the e-commerce returned goodsfrom final consumption points back to retailers.As an alternative to traditional ways, this solution delivers the returned goodsand passengers in an integrated way by leveraging the extra loading capacity and constant mobility provided by taxis thatare already reserved to transport passengers. Thus, it could simultaneously migrate the negative economical, environmentaland social impacts of reverse flows management. To address the issue of the returned goods collection, we first conduct thequalitative and quantitative study, and further investigate the feasibility and viability of the solution based on three real-worlddatasets, which consist of locations of shops, a road network and a large-scale trajectory data generated by over 7000 taxisin a month in the city of Hangzhou, China. Three collection strategies are proposed and evaluated. Experimental resultsgenerate several useful insights into the implementability and managerial issues of the proposed solution

Crowd logistics: an opportunity for more sustainable urban freight transport?

“…The distinction can be made between intra-urban, inter-urban and global scale on the one hand [23] and regional, national, international and worldwide scale on the other hand [2]. Literature generally limits the CL concept to city distribution and last mile logistics [2,3,6,22,24,25,30]. The interviewed practitioners, however, expressed interest in concepts in which city logistics is just one component and even concepts that exclude the last mile.…”

“…Fourth, the undefined character of the crowd, as proposed by different authors [2,6,16]. The practitioners acknowledged this as an essential element of CL but indicated that the unknown crowd identity represents a substantial source of stress.…”

“…In the pilot project in Finland, the crowd consisted of both local inhabitants and pizza-deliverers [7]. Chen et al [6] investigated the possibilities of using taxis and the Dutch initiative Sjipit only accepts independents on its platform, irrespective of their professional activities [60].…”

Using customer-related data to enhance e-grocery home delivery

“…Organizational innovations refer to the implementation of innovative organization models or methods for LMD. Examples include urban consolidation centers (Allen et al, 2014;Van Duin et al, 2010), synchronization and horizontal collaboration (De Souza et al, 2014), and crowdsourcing (Paloheimo et al, 2016;Chen et al, 2017). Technologyenabled innovations are the result of the application of emerging technologies in LMD.…”

“…For example, and propose mining taxi-Floating Car Data (FCD) to determine time-dependent travel times in a city and use that information to optimize routing. Chen et al (2017) mines taxi-FCD to plan taxi-based crowdsourcing LMD in big cities. These examples have indicated a great potential for data techniques to improve LMD, especially in the context of city logistics.…”