PFI:BIC - Smart CROwdsourced Urban Delivery (CROUD) System

创新伙伴关系：建设创新能力（PFI：BIC）旨在开发一个众包城市交付（CROUD）系统，承诺建立一个高效，绿色的城市交付服务系统。电子商务的兴起正在迅速改变零售业的格局。 根据2014年美国人口普查局的一份报告，到2017年，在线销售将占这个4.5万亿美元行业的10%以上。 为了在这个不断增长的市场中保持竞争力，零售商面临着巨大的压力，必须以低廉的价格将商品快速交付给消费者。 大型资产运营商（例如，UPS和FedEx）在城市地区的快递本地交付方面并不特别具有成本效益，主要是因为它们的配送网络旨在通过枢纽运输，而不是直接在客户和零售商之间运输。 这种固有的低效率由于对当天交付的需求不断增加而加剧-目前被广泛认为是电子商务的圣杯-这需要更频繁的调度，从而增加了运输成本。 亚马逊、谷歌和优步等科技巨头最近在这一战场的到来证明了城市快递行业的巨大机遇和挑战。具有讽刺意味的是，运输系统中存在大量未使用的容量。 首先，由于城市快递行业高度分散，整合其能力往往很困难。另一个未充分利用的能力是道路上数百万辆私人客车，其后备箱是空的，可用于送货。 解决供需之间缺乏充分协调的问题是解决城市快递挑战的关键。 由无线通信和移动的计算的最新进展实现的有希望的解决方案是已经成功应用于乘客运输（例如，Uber和Lyft）。 该项目的总体目标是开发和评估一个CROUD（Crowd-sourced Urban Delivery）系统。 通过Croud，消费者将享受更快、更便宜、更可靠的送货服务。零售业将看到更强劲的消费需求。 交付行业将提高其盈利能力，减少其对环境的影响，同时雇用高度移动的和高效的劳动力。 该项目还将教育下一代企业家，提供培训机会和材料，以更新多个学科的课程。 该项目的科学贡献跨越多个学科，它们在支持以人为本的智能CROUD系统方面紧密相连。 首先，该项目将导致定价机制，侧重于在不同的市场条件下将消费者与快递员相匹配。 匹配模型的使用在双边市场的定价分析中是新颖的，例如在Croud系统中发现的房子，并且它承诺在其他市场中的见解。 其次，该项目将有助于理解和预测人类在Croud系统中的行为和选择，这对行为计量经济学家来说是一个全新的领域。 新的计量经济学模型，与本项目收集的行为数据进行校准，将被纳入管理战略，以加强系统中的消费者-快递-技术互动。 第三，拟议的研究将开发基于智能手机的运动检测方法，这些方法独特地适合于跟踪和解释信使的活动。 最后，该项目将创建计算工具，以促进快递员之间的协作交付，并根据实时信息优化路由计划。在此过程中，将产生新的公式，算法和见解，以解决运筹学和计算经济学中具有挑战性的问题，例如使用继电器的网络设计，考虑转移和环境影响的实时车辆路由。该项目将由西北大学通过其运输中心（NUTC）领导，来自两个部门的三名研究人员：土木与环境工程系、管理经济与决策科学系。主要的行业合作伙伴是Zipments Inc.。（小企业，纽约市，纽约）和其他主要学术合作伙伴是伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校（UIC）（非营利性研究型大学，芝加哥，伊利诺伊州）。 两个更广泛的背景合作伙伴也将加入团队。它们是创新运输技术商业化中心（在伊利诺斯州埃文斯顿NUTC内运营的非营利研究机构）和供应链和物流管理中心（隶属于伊利诺斯州芝加哥UIC的非营利研究机构）。

This Partnerships for Innovation:Building Innovation Capacity (PFI:BIC) aims to develop a crowd-sourced urban delivery (CROUD) system that promises an efficient, greener, urban delivery service system. The rise of e-commerce is rapidly changing the landscape of retail business. By 2017, online sales will account for more than 10% of this $4.5 trillion industry, according to a 2014 U.S. Census Bureau report. To stay competitive in this growing market, retailers are under enormous pressure to quickly deliver the goods to their consumers at low prices. Large asset-based carriers (e.g., UPS and FedEx) are not particularly cost-efficient for express local deliveries in urban areas, essentially because their distribution networks are designed to transport through hubs rather than directly between customers and retailers. This inherent inefficiency is aggravated by mounting demand for same-day delivery--widely considered the Holy Grail for e-commerce at present--that requires more frequent dispatch and in turn increases transportation cost. Recent arrival of tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Uber in this battlefield attests to the tremendous opportunities and challenges in the urban delivery industry. Ironically, there exists a large volume of unused capacity in the transport system. For one thing, because the urban delivery industry is highly fragmented, consolidating its capacity is often difficult. Another underutilized capacity exists in millions of private passenger vehicles on the road with empty trunks that could be used for delivery. Addressing this lack of adequate coordination between demand and supply holds the key to solving the express urban delivery challenge. A promising solution, enabled by recent advances in wireless communication and mobile computing, is crowd-sourcing technology that has been successfully applied in passenger transport (e.g., Uber and Lyft). The overarching goal of this project is to develop and evaluate a CROwd-sourced Urban Delivery (CROUD) system. With CROUD, consumers will enjoy faster, cheaper and more reliable delivery service. The retail industry will see a stronger consumer demand. The delivery industry will improve its profitability and reduce its environmental impact, while employing a highly mobile and efficient workforce. The project will also educate next generation entrepreneurs by providing training opportunities and materials for upgrading curricula in multiple disciplines. The scientific contributions of the project span across several disciplines, and they are closely interconnected in supporting a human-centered smart CROUD system. First, the project will lead to pricing mechanisms that focus on matching consumers with couriers under varying market conditions. The use of matching models is novel in pricing analysis for two-sided markets, such as thouse found in CROUD systems, and it promises insights in other markets. Second, the project will help understand and predict behaviors and choices of humans in a CROUD system, a field completely new to behavioral econometrists. New econometric models, calibrated with behavioral data collected in this project, will be built into management strategies to enhance the consumer-courier-technology interaction in the system. Third, the proposed research will develop smartphone-based motion detection methods that are uniquely suited to track and interpret the activities of couriers. Finally, the project will create computational tools to facilitate collaborative delivery among couriers and to optimize routing plans based on real-time information. In doing so, new formulations, algorithms and insights will be generated for challenging problems in operations research and computational economics such as network design with relays, real-time vehicle routing considering transfer and environmental impacts.This project will be led by Northwestern University through its Transportation Center (NUTC), with three researchers from two departments: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Science. The primary industry partner is Zipments Inc. (small business, New York City, New York) and the other primary academic partner is the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) (non-profit research university, Chicago, Illinois). Two broader context partners will also join the team. They are Center for Commercialization of Innovative Transportation Technology (non-profit research institution operated within NUTC, Evanston, Illinois) and Center for Supply Chain and Logistics management (non-profit research institution affiliated with UIC, Chicago, Illinois).