Heterogeneity of Items in an Integrated Item-Sharing and Crowdshipping Setting

Abstract

We consider the operational planning of a platform that integrates two concepts of the sharing economy, namely item-sharing and crowdshipping. In item-sharing, members of a community can temporarily rent items from one another (peer-to-peer). Crowdshipping is an innovative means of transportation where private drivers execute delivery jobs along their intended trips. It has been shown by Behrend and Meisel (Transp Res B Methodol 111:227–243, 2018) that this integration leads to a number of assignment problems, whose optimal solution allows to increase a platform’s profit and the level of service provided to item-sharing consumers. However, this result has only been evaluated for scenarios with homogeneous items so far. Since item-sharing platforms usually serve as a market place for a wide range of products we investigate here how this finding is effected when heterogeneous items are considered. Our results show that integrating crowdshipping with item-sharing becomes even more relevant in a setting with heterogeneous items.

The online version of this chapter (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18500-8_34) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.