A Heuristic Approach to Design a Crowd-Based Last-Mile Delivery Network

Crowd logistics (CL) rose in the last years as an effective strategy to manage last-mile deliveries, especially in urban areas, which are often one of the main causes of the increased road traffic and, at the same time, negatively impacting on the environment. Within CL, the last-mile delivery is entrusted to the crowd, i.e. normal people willing to finalize the delivery, deviating as little as possible from their standard route, in exchange for an economic remuneration. In this context, this paper proposes a three-step heuristic approach to design a crowd-based last-mile delivery network, managing the whole process from the delivery of the goods in intermediate lockers by traditional shippers, up to the delivery to the final customers by occasional drivers (ODs). The proposed integrated approach is applied to the case study of the city of Bologna (Italy) to showcase its effectiveness. In fact, the city of Bologna is fully suitable for the implementation of CL due to the presence of traffic regulations in the city centre and for the high presence of university students which can potentially serve as OD.