Crowd-shipping: A new efficient and eco-friendly delivery strategy

In this work, we study the concept of crowd-sourced delivery that aims at exploiting the space of ordinary vehicles, that usually travel on the roads, for delivering parcels. In particular, we introduce a variant of the vehicle routing problem with crowd-shipping. A company makes deliveries by using an own fleet of conventional vehicles as well as some occasional drivers. The occasional drivers are ordinary people, who decide to make a deviation from their routes for delivering parcels to other people, for a small compensation. We show the benefits of using crowd-shipping in terms of saving costs, improving quality of service and decreasing environmental impacts.