Using taxis to collect citywide E-commerce reverse flows: a crowdsourcing solution
Résumé
The popularity of round-the-clock online shopping urges the rapid growth of e-commerce, which substantially generates
additional parcels for the distribution on the forward side. On the other hand, collecting the returned goods on the revere
side is also increasingly becoming a preoccupation, particularly in the crowd and dense metropolitan areas. Inspired by the
concepts of Crowdsourcing and Physical Internet,we propose an innovative solution to collect the e-commerce returned goods
from final consumption points back to retailers.As an alternative to traditional ways, this solution delivers the returned goods
and passengers in an integrated way by leveraging the extra loading capacity and constant mobility provided by taxis that
are already reserved to transport passengers. Thus, it could simultaneously migrate the negative economical, environmental
and social impacts of reverse flows management. To address the issue of the returned goods collection, we first conduct the
qualitative and quantitative study, and further investigate the feasibility and viability of the solution based on three real-world
datasets, which consist of locations of shops, a road network and a large-scale trajectory data generated by over 7000 taxis
in a month in the city of Hangzhou, China. Three collection strategies are proposed and evaluated. Experimental results
generate several useful insights into the implementability and managerial issues of the proposed solution.