Last-mile delivery with shared resources: modeling and recent develop...

The Sharing Economy is on the rise. Traditional business models have to be adapted and players have to succeed in a world of shared idle capacities on digital platforms. Innovative concepts related to shared transportation resources include collaborative vehicle routing or crowd delivery systems. A collaboration can be described as a partnership between two or more companies to optimize operations by making joint decisions and sharing information, resources, or profits. Crowdsourced deliveries are either conducted by freelance drivers or by occasional drivers, where the former conduct several tasks over a longer time horizon typically being active on different platforms, while the latter offer their service on a more irregular basis. Both of these concepts have their advantages but also specific challenges. In case of horizontal transport collaborations we distinguish between centralized and decentralized settings. In the former, it is assumed that one fully informed decision maker exists, while in the latter, decisions under incomplete information have to be orchestrated. Crowd delivery concepts, however, highly rely on the willingness of external drivers to offer their service. Hence, attractive offers have to made. We focus on the generation of bundles of requests such that the distribution of orders assigned to external drivers and to a company-owned fleet is optimized. The talk will cover modeling approaches, recent developments, and promising future directions.