The economic impact of crowd-shipping based on public transport in Egypt: a GA approach.

Abstract

The last-mile delivery challenges and complexity are increasing simultaneously with the e-commerce growth, the e-commerce growth constitutes a threat to urban transport, especially for big cities and developing countries. This paper examines the economic impact of crowd-shipping based on public transport collaborated with the automated parcel locker and the impact of traditional delivery, as two different methods of last-mile delivery under the same circumstances. This paper aims to assess crowd-shipping as an alternative solution for last-mile delivery compared to traditional delivery. Data has been simulated based on Cairo reality, one of the largest cities in the world. The mathematical models were formulated for the problem, where the first model objective function minimizes the costs of vehicle possession and vehicle kilometers traveled, while the second model objective function minimizes the costs of establishing lockers, vehicle possession, and vehicle kilometers traveled. A genetic algorithm has been used due to the complexity of the problem. The results show that the economic impact of the crowd-shipping delivery system is better than the traditional delivery system under the conditions of large-sized and medium-sized demand, while the economic impact of traditional delivery is better than the crowd-shipping delivery system under the conditions of small-sized demand.