Compensation scheme and split delivery in a collaborative passenger-parcel transportation system

The emerging collaborative passenger-parcel transport (CPT) mode aims to address the significant imbalance between passenger and parcel transport demand for last-mile delivery. By enabling passengers and parcels to share a single vehicle’s capacity, CPT reduces resource underutilization during off-peak hours and alleviates traffic congestion during peak hours. However, the successful implementation of such systems is not guaranteed, as passengers may decline shared rides due to reduced service quality. Compensation mechanisms, which incentivize passengers’ acceptance, offer a promising solution to such an issue. However, the design of optimal compensation scheme has not yet been investigated in the existing literature of collaborative transport. To fill this gap, this study incorporates compensation-affected behavior into a typical routing problem of the CPT system, where the routing problem allows delivery requests to be split across multiple trips and permits multiple visits to each node. We formulate this problem as the compensation scheme design in split delivery vehicle routing problem with time windows for a collaborative passenger-parcel transport system (C-SDVRPTW-CPT). We solve it by developing a Surrogate-based Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search framework (SOT-ALNS). Numerical experiments validate the model and algorithm, demonstrating the fast convergence of the algorithm and the advantages of collaborative transport and compensation, which improves profit by 3%–10%.