In this seminar, Buğra Çınar will give a talk about Pricing, bundling, and compensation decisions in dynamic crowdsourced delivery problems.
Crowdsourced delivery leverages the unused transport capacity of vehicles already on the road to perform parcel deliveries. While it can potentially tackle challenges in urban delivery, it also introduces unique planning challenges, notably the operator’s lack of direct control over driver availability and acceptance behavior. Compensation, now, also is a decision of the operator, which affects drivers’ behavior. In addition, the operator can offer bundles of tasks, which further shape drivers’ responses and increase the problem’s complexity. Therefore, we study a setting in which tasks and drivers arrive dynamically and stochastically, explicitly model driver- and offer-dependent acceptance probabilities, and jointly determine bundles and compensation. We formulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process and solve it using Value Function Approximation within an Approximate Dynamic Programming framework. Preliminary results show clear advantages over benchmark policies.
