Multi-Tier Adaptive Memory Programming and Cluster- and Job-based Relocation for Distributed On-demand Crowdshipping

Abstract: With rapid e-commerce growth, on-demand urban delivery is having a high time especially for food, grocery, and retail, often requiring delivery in a very short amount of time after an order is placed. This imposes significant financial and operational challenges for traditional vehicle-based delivery methods. Crowdshipping, which employs ordinary people with a low pay rate and limited time availability, has emerged as an attractive alternative. This paper proposes a multi-tier adaptive memory programming (M-TAMP) to tackle on-demand assignment of requests to crowdsourcees with spatially distributed request origins and destination and crowdsourcee starting points. M-TAMP starts with multiple initial solutions constructed based on different plausible contemplations in assigning requests to crowdsourcees, and organizes solution search through waves, phases, and steps, imitating both ocean waves and human memory functioning while seeking the best solution. The assignment is further enforced by proactively relocating idle crowdsourcees, for which a computationally efficient cluster- and job-based strategy is devised. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superiority of MTAMP over a number of existing methods, and that relocation can greatly improve the efficiency of crowdsourcee-request assignment.