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Ongoing

CaaS: Crowdsourced Delivery for Sustainable Cities

Started October 2023
Lab for Optimising Public Transport

Funder: Technical University of Denmark, EuroTech Alliance | Partners: TU/e

Crowdsourced Delivery as an Activity for Sustainable Cities (CaaS)

🏙️ Background

With rapid global urbanization, mobility challenges related to the transfer of passengers and cargo are escalating in cities. Recent years have witnessed a radical increase in e-commerce enabled by ICT development. While e-commerce may seem to help reduce passenger shopping trips, it generates at least one delivery trip by courier companies.

In Amsterdam, for example, daily parcel delivery is predicted to surge from 40,000 to 100,000 in the coming decades. Meanwhile, courier companies face increasing restrictions, such as low emission zones and delivery window constraints. The European Union calls for innovative sustainable solutions to this growing logistic demand.

📦 The Concept: Crowdsourced Delivery (CD)

Crowdsourced Delivery (CD) is an emerging concept defined as outsourcing a delivery task to a crowd—specifically, a traveller using their spare capacity on an existing trip. It benefits all stakeholders:

🚶

The Carrier

Earns extra income by picking up and delivering a parcel during their existing trip.

🏢

Courier Company

Lowers operating costs and increases efficiency in last-mile logistics.

🌳

The City

Reduces traffic congestion and the environmental footprint of deliveries.

📉 Motivation & Objectives

Despite industry interest, only a fraction of crowdsourced companies (e.g., Deliveroo, Cocolis) have established a lasting market. Furthermore, if travellers make extra dedicated trips for delivery rather than modifying existing ones, it can cause rebound effects that worsen urban traffic.

Project Goals

To address these issues, this project aims to establish and examine the concept of Crowdsourced Delivery as an Activity. The novelty lies in considering the delivery task as a secondary activity in a commuter's daily trip chain.

We aim to create knowledge regarding:

  1. Influential Factors: What motivates travellers to become carriers as a secondary activity?
  2. Incentive Mechanisms: How can courier companies provide the right incentives to the right people during their most suitable trips?

By engaging citizens in delivery activities during their regular commutes, we aim to unlock a sustainable, integrated solution for urban logistics.

📚 Output

Publications

  • Akbarpour, M., Jiang, Y., & Nielsen, O. A. (2025). Optimisation of Last-Mile Parcel Delivery: Leveraging Crowdsourcing and Mobile Parcel Lockers. In Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting 2024.
  • Akbarpour, M., Røpke, S., Nielsen, O. A., Jiang, Y., Rasouli, S., & Liao, F. (2025). Parcel placement optimization in multimodal last-mile crowdsourced delivery: A behavioral framework. In EURO 2025: 34th European Conference on Operational Research (pp. 195-195).
  • Akbarpour, M., Røpke, S., Nielsen, O. A., & Jiang, Y. (2024). Optimising Crowd-shipping with Parcel Lockers for Last-Mile Delivery. In EURO-2024 Copenhagen: 33rd European Conference on Operational Research.