A Multimodal Passenger-and-Package Sharing Network for Urban Logistics

This paper envisions a multimodal passenger-and-package sharing (PPS) network for urban logistics integrating metro, taxi, and truck. A hub-and-spoke structure is designed including hubs located at metro stations and service stores connected to the hubs. Packages are transported by metro on backbone links between the hubs and are carried by taxis or trucks between service stores and hubs, depending on the unit costs of these two modes and capacity constraint of the taxi. A mixed integer linear programming model for hub location problems--fusing the multiassignment p-hub median problem without capacity constraints and the capacitated multiassignment p-hub covering problem--is formulated to optimize the multimodal PPS network. The model is implemented based on the real-world data in Shanghai (China) under a series of scenarios to evaluate the network performance from two perspectives: the number of hubs and the proportion of taxi drivers who are willing to carry packages. The scenarios show that with increased number of hubs, the spatial distribution of hubs disperses from the city center to peripheral areas and more areas can be serviced by taxis. There is, however, a trade-off between the operation cost saved by taxis and the establishment cost of an extra hub. The analysis also presents that if the proportion of taxis willing to carry packages associates with the incentive payments to taxi drivers, an optimal value of incentives exists, by balancing the operation costs of taxis and trucks.
1. Introduction The demand for urban parcel delivery booms with the prevalence of e-commerce in the recent years. Take China as an example. Over 40 billion packages were delivered in [...]