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Challenges and opportunities in crowdsourced delivery planning and operations

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Abstract

How to best deliver goods to consumers has been a logistics question since time immemorial. However, almost all traditional delivery models involved a form of company employees, whether employees of the company manufacturing the goods or whether employees of the company transporting the goods. With the growth of the gig economy, however, a new model not involving company employees has emerged: relying on crowdsourced delivery. Crowdsourced delivery involves enlisting individuals to deliver goods and interacting with these individuals using the internet. In crowdsourced delivery, the interaction with the individuals typically occurs through a platform. Importantly, the crowdsourced couriers are not employed by the platform and this has fundamentally changed the planning and execution of the delivery of goods: the delivery capacity is no longer under (full) control of the company managing the delivery. We present the challenges this introduces, review how the research community has proposed to handle some of these challenges, and elaborate on the challenges that have not yet been addressed.

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Acknowledgements

Marlin Ulmer’s work is funded by the DFG Emmy Noether Programme, Project 444657906. We gratefully acknowledge their support.

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  1. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

    Martin W.P Savelsbergh

  2. Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany

    Marlin W. Ulmer

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  1. Martin W.P Savelsbergh
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Correspondence to Martin W.P Savelsbergh.

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Savelsbergh, M.W., Ulmer, M.W. Challenges and opportunities in crowdsourced delivery planning and operations. 4OR-Q J Oper Res 20, 1–21 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10288-021-00500-2

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