Outsourcing service price for crowd-shipping based on on-demand mobility services

Abstract

Online-to-offline (O2O) parcel delivery service providers (PSPs) are facing ever-increasing pressure to provide timely and reliable delivery services. An emerging form of collaborative crowd-shipping based on on-demand mobility (COM) services, which utilizes the excess capacity of on-demand mobility vehicles (e.g., taxis and ride-hailing vehicles) to deliver O2O parcels, is proposed to alleviate PSP’s delivery pressure while improving the profitability for the on-demand mobility service provider (OMP). This study investigates an outsourcing service price problem for a collaborative COM considering the game play between PSP and OMP. A bilevel optimization model is formulated, and a customized iterative hybrid (IH) algorithm integrating two tabu search algorithms with objective-oriented granularity and a genetic algorithm is proposed to find the solution. Numerical experiments conducted on randomly generated instances and a real-life case study demonstrate that the COM model with a well-designed outsourcing service price can benefit both participants, with PSP achieving up to 17.0 % cost savings and OMP achieving up to 15.8% profit improvement.