The Two Echelon Open Vehicle Routing Problem: Optimization of Crowdshipping Based Parcel Delivery

Crowdshipping is a revolutionary concept of the sharing economy. In this study, two carriers are used to perform the following expedition: the truck starts from the depot to complete part of the deliveries, shares part of the load with the crowdshipper at the relay point, and the private driver selected as the crowdshipper continues from that point onward. This study proposes the two-echelon open vehicle routing problem with crowdshipping (2EOVRP-CS) and formulates a mathematical model to determine the crowdshipper, parcel relay location, truck route, and crowdsource route. A tangible nested genetic algorithm (NGA) is proposed, and its efficiency is demonstrated by comparison with CPLEX and genetic algorithm (GA). A real case study is investigated in Xi’an city to test the applicability of the proposed model. The results show that using crowdshipping instead of truck delivery alone can save approximately 14% of the total cost and 26% of truck vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Moreover, several sensitivity analyses are performed. The results show that crowdshipping is sensitive to the detour limit and the time value of carriers. For the detour limit, after the acceptable detour distance increases by 8%, the total cost can be reduced by up to 5.94%.