Towards Green Crowdsourced Social Delivery Networks: A Feasibility Study

With the ever-increasing popularity of fitness trackers, data on the time and location of popular walking, running, and bicycling routes is expansive and growing rapidly. This data is currently used primarily for route discovery and personal fitness tracking, but it may also be leveraged to build ad-hoc transportation flows. We present a novel model that creates delivery networks from these zero-emission transportation flows, and we evaluate the model using data from two popular datasets. Our results indicate that such networks are indeed possible, and can help reduce traffic, emissions, and delivery times. Moreover, we demonstrate how our results can be consistently reproduced in different cities with different subsets of carriers.