Optimizing an express delivery mode based on high-speed railway and crowd-couriers

The rapid development of e-commerce has led to various challenges in the express delivery industry. To provide efficient and economical delivery services, this study introduces a joint transportation system for parcel delivery utilizing high-speed railway (HSR) and crowd-couriers. In this system, long-haul transportation between cities is conducted by HSR, which enables multiple transshipments in different operation lines. The pre-haul parcel pickup and end-haul delivery services within the city are performed by crowd-couriers, thus achieving door-to-door transportation. A mathematical model is developed to jointly optimize the freight allocation problem in the rail segment and the crowd-courier routing problem in the road segment. The freight allocation problem is formulated based on the concept of transportation plans. The transportation plans with and without transshipments are found by a depth-first search-based algorithm in the rail segment. A customized heuristic algorithm based on the adaptive large neighborhood search with multiple operators is designed to find a near-optimal solution. A set of numerical experiments demonstrates the speed and accuracy with which the proposed method solves different-sized versions of problem. A sensitivity analysis based on a real HSR network is also conducted to provide more reliable managerial insights for operators.