Shared Last Mile Delivery

Abstract

Last mile delivery is the most expensive part of the delivery operations. Especially with the significant growth in e-commerce, last mile delivery operations continue to increase. Since most of the parcels are delivered to urban and suburban areas, the delivery operations have a considerable impact on our lives, by increasing the air and noise pollution and worsening the traffic within cities. The crowdsourcing and sharing economy approaches, such as crowdsourced delivery and shared urban distribution centers, in last mile delivery may reduce these negative externalities. However, since these approaches are relatively new and bring new aspects that were not part of the conventional business models, open questions arise in both business applications and academic research. In this chapter, we provide a brief history of e-commerce and related optimization literature. We introduce several sharing economy business models in last mile delivery and discuss the open problems that might be studied by comparing these business models to the conventional ones.