Challenges and opportunities in crowdsourced delivery planning and operations—an update

How to best deliver goods to consumers has been a logistics question since time immemorial. However, almost all traditional delivery models involved a form of company employees, whether employees of the company manufacturing the goods or whether employees of the company transporting the goods. With the growth of the gig economy, however, a new model not involving company employees has emerged: relying on crowdsourced delivery. Crowdsourced delivery involves enlisting individuals to deliver goods and interacting with these individuals using the internet. In crowdsourced delivery, the interaction with the individuals typically occurs through a platform. Importantly, the crowdsourced couriers are not employed by the platform and this has fundamentally changed the planning and execution of the delivery of goods: the delivery capacity is no longer under (full) control of the company managing the delivery. We present the challenges this introduces, review how the research community has proposed to handle some of these challenges, and elaborate on the challenges that have not yet been addressed. In this update, we expand the literature review and discuss new challenges that have emerged in the past years. (This is an updated version of the paper “Challenges and Opportunities in Crowdsourced Delivery Planning and Operations” that appeared in 4OR, 20(1), 1-21 (2022)).