Using taxis to collect citywide E-commerce reverse flows: a crowdsourcing solution
提出利用出租车闲置运力收集电商退货的众包方案，基于杭州7000多辆出租车一个月的轨迹数据验证可行性，并评估三种收集策略。
The popularity of round-the-clock online shopping urges the rapid growth of e-commerce, which substantially generates additional parcels for the distribution on the forward side. On the other hand, collecting the returned goods on the revere side is also increasingly becoming a preoccupation, particularly in the crowd and dense metropolitan areas. Inspired by the concepts of Crowdsourcing and Physical Internet, we propose an innovative solution to collect the e-commerce returned goods from final consumption points back to retailers. As an alternative to traditional ways, this solution delivers the returned goods and passengers in an integrated way by leveraging the extra loading capacity and constant mobility provided by taxis that are already reserved to transport passengers. Thus, it could simultaneously migrate the negative economical, environmental and social impacts of reverse flows management. To address the issue of the returned goods collection, we first conduct the qualitative and quantitative study, and further investigate the feasibility and viability of the solution based on three real-world datasets, which consist of locations of shops, a road network and a large-scale trajectory data generated by over 7000 taxis in a month in the city of Hangzhou, China. Three collection strategies are proposed and evaluated. Experimental results generate several useful insights into the implementability and managerial issues of the proposed solution.