Crowdsourced vehicles and UAVs for last-mile delivery application using blockchain-hosted matching mechanism

Abstract

The crowdsourcing paradigm has been used for last-mile delivery applications to offer cost-efficient delivery through crowdsourced vehicles. The increasing demand from users for fast delivery led to the adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) due to their speed and cost, for instance, in peak hours. However, existing frameworks do not offer a comprehensive solution that utilizes vehicles and UAVs for transparent, timely, and cost-efficient delivery. This paper proposes a novel supply chain management framework on a consortium blockchain with last-mile delivery through crowdsourced vehicles and UAVs. The blockchain-based framework aims to provide last-mile delivery for time-critical tasks in a transparent and cost-efficient manner. A blockchain-hosted Gale-Shapley Matching mechanism is designed for allocating delivery tasks to UAVs and vehicles that will perform them timely and cost-efficiently. The allocation mechanism is incorporated in the proposed management framework consisting of smart contracts that autonomously respond to members' interactions. In addition, the framework stores the supply chain process data transparently and immutably. The performed experiments explore the feasibility of the proposed solution showing the increase in task allocation percentage (at least 6%) and reward (at least 50%) while reducing the delivery time (at least 23%) compared to the considered benchmarks.