Approximate Dynamic Programming for Crowd-shipping with In-store Customers

Crowd-shipping has gained significant attention as a last-mile delivery option over the recent years. In this study, we propose a variant of dynamic crowd-shipping model with in-store customers as crowd-shippers to deliver online orders within few hours. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process and develop an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) policy using … Read more

Stochastic Last-mile Delivery with Crowd-shipping and Mobile Depots

This paper proposes a two-tier last-mile delivery model that optimally selects mobile depot locations in advance of full information about the availability of crowd-shippers, and then transfers packages to crowd-shippers for the final shipment to the customers. Uncertainty in crowd-shipper availability is incorporated by modeling the problem as a two-stage stochastic integer program. Enhanced decomposition … Read more