A Truthful Combinatorial Reverse Auction Mechanism for Crowdshipping

Abstract

Crowdshipping is an emerging logistics paradigm that leverages excess capacities of occasional couriers to transport goods. This paper investigates the problem that a crowdshipping platform recruits occasional couriers to serve the parcel pickup and delivery requests. A combinatorial reverse auction framework is introduced to model the interactions between the platform and couriers. We design an auction mechanism that implements in polynomial time, which satisfies the computational requirements of crowdshipping. It can also achieve near-optimal social cost with the approximation ratio rigidly proved. Through both rigorous theoretical analyses and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed auction mechanism is truthful, individual rational and has high computation efficiency.