On Exploiting Ride-Sharing and Crowd-Shipping Schemes within the Physical Internet Framework

Advanced technologies and innovative services are expected to provide a significant change in mobility scenarios in the near future. In this framework, in order to better exploit the supply capacity, a shared mobility service is proposed in this paper for both people and freights: drivers agree to share their trips with some riders and/or to carry some parcels, during the whole trip or in a part of it. This allows to reduce the number of travels and, consequently, users' costs and the environmental impact on the territory. The proposed approach is based on the ride-sharing and crowd-shipping concepts which appear to be highly effective and promising in order to reduce the number of circulating vehicles. In addition, crowd-shipping can also contribute to the spread of the physical internet paradigm, intended as the possibility of splitting freights into smaller standardized boxes and parcels, routing them through alternative paths, and re-assembling them at destination, in analogy to data packets in the digital internet. In the paper, an optimization framework and the relevant solution algorithm are proposed in order to find the optimal pairings between drivers, riders, and freight deliveries as well as the relevant optimal routes and times.