The trend towards shorter delivery lead-times reduces operational efficiency and increases transportation costs for internet retailers. Mobile technology, however, creates new opportunities to organize the last-mile. In this paper, we study the concept of crowdsourced delivery that aims to use excess capacity on journeys that already take place to make deliveries. We consider a peer-to-peer platform that automatically creates matches between parcel delivery tasks and ad-hoc drivers. The platform also operates a fleet of backup vehicles to serve the tasks that cannot be served by the ad-hoc drivers. The matching of tasks, drivers and backup vehicles gives rise to a new variant of the dynamic pickup and delivery problem. We propose a rolling horizon framework and develop an exact solution approach to solve the various subproblems. In order to investigate the potential benefit of crowdsourced delivery, we conduct a wide range of computational experiments. The experiments provide insights into the viability of crowdsourced delivery under various assumptions about the environment and the behavior of the ad-hoc drivers. The results suggest that the use of ad-hoc drivers has the potential to make the last-mile more cost-efficient and can reduce the system-wide vehicle-miles.

A truck platoon is a set of virtually linked trucks that drive closely behind one another using automated driving technology. Benefits of truck platooning include cost savings, reduced emissions, and more efficient use of road capacity. To fully reap these benefits in the initial phases of technology deployment, careful planning of platoons based on trucks' itineraries and time schedules is required. This paper provides a framework to classify various new transportation planning problems that arise in truck platooning, surveys relevant operations research models for these problems in the literature and identifies directions for future research.

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C arbon footprinting is a tool for firms to determine the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their supply chain or with a unit of final product or service. Carbon footprinting typically aims to identify where best to invest in emission reduction efforts, and/or to determine the proportion of total emissions that an individual firm is accountable for, whether financially and/or operationally. A major and underrecognized challenge in determining the appropriate allocation stems from the high degree to which GHG emissions are the result of joint efforts by multiple firms. We introduce a simple but general model of joint production of GHG emissions in general supply chains, decomposing the total footprint into processes, each of which can be influenced by any combination of firms. We analyze two main scenarios. In the first scenario, the social planner allocates emissions to individual firms and imposes a cost on them (such as a carbon tax) in proportion to the emissions allocated. In the second scenario, a carbon leader voluntarily agrees to offset all emissions in the entire supply chain and then contracts with individual firms to recoup (part of) the costs of those offsets. In both cases, we find that, to induce the optimal effort levels, the emissions need to be overallocated, even if the carbon tax is the true social cost of carbon. This is in contrast to the usual focus in the life-cycle assessment (LCA) and carbon footprinting literatures on avoiding double counting. Our work aims to lay the foundation for a framework to integrate the economics-and LCA-based perspectives on supply chain carbon footprinting.

Intermodal freight transport has been discussed for decades as an alternative to unimodal road transport. However, it still does not represent a significant portion of the total freight market. A new and promising possibility to improve the performance of freight systems is the synchromodal design of hinterland transport systems. A cornerstone for synchromodality is an integrated view in the design and operation of intermodal transport. A main benefit of this integrated view is an improved flexibility in mode choice in hinterland transport. This paper gives a detailed description of this integrated view for synchromodal freight transport. Based on this description, a mathematical model for designing service schedules for synchromodal freight transport systems is also presented. The benefits of providing integrated transport services compared to separately planned transport services are also discussed for a case in the hinterland network of the Port of Rotterdam.