Shared mobility oriented open vehicle routing with order radius decision

Abstract

In the era of sharing economy and the mobility-as-service, the last mile delivery system is undergoing revolutionary changes with emerging a lot of new operation modes and policies. The crowdsourced delivery mode has become a novel and popular practice in the last mile delivery industry. This mode brings a novel way for facilitating the efficiency of last mile delivery on the basis of the shared mobility. This paper studies an open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) for the shared mobility based last mile delivery mode, in which parcel delivery orders are disseminated within a circle to attract occasional vehicles (or couriers) to fulfill these orders. Different from the traditional OVRP, this study further considers the decision of the above mentioned circle's radius, which should be balanced between attracting enough vehicles and reducing additional cost (reward) for covering vehicles’ empty trips to the pickup location. This paper proposes a nonlinear mixed-integer programming model for the problem. A column generation based solution method is implemented to solve the model. Some numerical experiments are also conducted to validate the efficiency of the solution method and draw out some managerial implications for the practitioners. The proposed methodology in this paper may be potentially benefit not only for reducing the last mile delivery cost but also for promoting the modern transportation paradigm revolution to ridesharing and mobility-as-service.