Ridesharing as a Service: Exploring Crowdsourced Connected Vehicle Information for Intelligent Package Delivery

Nowadays online shopping has become explosively popular and the vast numbers of generated packages have brought great challenges to the traditional logistics industry, especially the last mile package delivery. Traditional delivery approaches rely on dedicated couriers for package dispatch, while the labor cost is quite expensive and the quality is hard to guarantee due to the diverse delivery addresses and tight deadlines. On the other hand, modern cities are full of available transportation resources such as private car trips. The mobile crowdsourcing through 4G/5G and vehicle-related communications enables the vehicle resources to be connected as an intelligent transportation system. As such, we believe ridesharing will be a core service for connected vehicles, which we refer to as Ridesharing as a Service (RaaS). In this paper, we focus on the quality of service (QoS) of RaaS in the last mile package delivery. Mining from real-world car trips, we build up a citywide routing graph and conduct a personalized travel cost prediction considering both the travel time of each driver and the fuel consumption of each vehicle. We then design an online algorithm to assign proper package delivery tasks to the submitted car trips, aiming to maximize the utility of the ridesharing service provider. Our extensive real-world trace-driven evaluations further demonstrate the superiority of our RaaS based package delivery.