Taxi Exp: A Novel Framework for City-Wide Package Express Shipping via Taxi Crowd Sourcing

Despite the great demand on and attempts at package express shipping services such as the same-day delivery feasible for online firms, turning a profit is still difficult. To develop more economical or even cost-free transportation of packages, in this paper, we propose to make use of the existing taxis on the street that are delivering passengers, in a crowd-sourced manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that exploits taxis occupied by passengers to help deliver package collectively, without hurting the quality of taxi services. Specifically, we propose a two-phase framework for the package express shipping. In the first phase, we rank the road segments according to their influential factor values, which is similar to the idea of identifying key people in social networks. Hubs are then identified based on the ranking and the geographical locations of the road segments. In the second phase, we develop two inter-hub routing algorithms, namely, First-Come-First-Service (FCFS) and Destination-Closer (Des Closer), to ship a package to its destination. We evaluate the two-phase framework on a large-scale real-world taxi data set, generated by 7,600 taxis in a month. Results show that, on average, the package delivery time based on Des Closer is 5.3 hours, which is 2.6x shorter than that of FCFS, the number of participating taxis per package based on Des Closer is 3.10, which is 10.6x fewer than that of FCFS.