Demystifying the Crowd Intelligence in Last Mile Parcel Delivery for Smart Cities

Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of online shopping, which has posted unprecedented pressure on the logistics industry, especially the last mile parcel delivery. Existing solutions mostly rely on dedicated couriers, which suffer from high cost and low elasticity when dealing with a massive amount of local addresses. Advances in the Internet of Things, however, have enabled vehicle information to be readily accessible anytime anywhere, forming an Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which further enables intelligent vehicle scheduling and management. New opportunities therefore arise toward efficient and elastic last mile delivery for smart cities. In this article, we seek novel solutions to improve the last mile parcel delivery with crowd intelligence. We first review the existing and emerging solutions for last mile parcel delivery. We then discuss the advances of the ride-sharing- based delivery mechanism, identifying the unique opportunities and challenges therein. We further present Car4Pac, an IoV-enabled intelligent ride-sharing-based delivery system for smart cities, and demonstrate its superiority with real trace-driven evaluations.