Abstract Providing the crowd-sourced delivery capacity and hence enabling the practice, occasional couriers (OC) are the most critical resource in crowd-shipping (CS). Therefore, as well as establishing and retaining a solid OC base, using the OC trips efficiently is of utmost importance for the viability of the CS applications. One auspicious idea to enhance the efficiency, i.e., cover a larger demand set with the available OC trips, is to use transshipments (deliver packages with a coordinated effort of OCs) and collect OC trip information in advance to efficiently coordinate them, which gives rise to the package routing problem with registered couriers (PRP-R) we introduce in this paper. In particular, we study a CS model in which the couriers register their trips in advance while the express shipping demands arrive through a stochastic process, and the network management needs to dynamically decide package-courier assignments to carry out deliveries in the most efficient way. We develop a novel rolling horizon algorithm to solve this challenging problem in real-time, which explicitly considers the limited OC capacities and use of a back-up delivery capacity (company-owned or third party provided) to ensure the service quality. Beyond the classical rolling horizon approaches, the suggested methodology uses a novel Monte Carlo procedure to take anticipated future system conditions into account, and thus can provide package-courier assignments that have almost the same cost with the optimal solution of the static version of the problem where all demand arrivals are known a-priory. The comprehensive numerical experiments attest to the efficacy of our methodology for the real-time management of the CS operations and provide significant managerial insights about the design of CS networks.

    Highlights We introduce the package routing problem with registered couriers and stochastic demand (PRP-R). We develop an efficient rolling horizon algorithm (RH) to solve PRP-R in short run times. We propose a novel Monte Carlo procedure to extend RH to consider future demand arrivals. Extended RH can provide solutions that are almost as good as the solutions of the problem with perfect information. We obtain significant managerial insights about the potential of crowd-shipping to support express urban deliveries.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Package routing problem with registered couriers and stochastic demand


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2021-01-24




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English





    Roadtest - Ford Couriers

    Kendall,J. / Ford Motor,GB | Automotive engineering | 1991


    Electric vehicle for couriers

    ZHU YUGEN | European Patent Office | 2016

    Free access