Crowdsourcing in city logistics: setting the stage and defining opportunities

The increasing complexity in city logistics generates traffic, long waiting times, emissions and costs due to the increasing number of home deliveries’ requests coming from e-commerce and digital market. Couriers often get trapped in urban traffic, with a general decrease of service level and higher environmental burden. Last-mile deliveries in urban areas represent a critical stage, due to the need for deliveries to many different destinations, some of them difficult to reach due to limited traffic zones and other restrictions. One of the solutions proposed by the literature is to assign last-mile delivery tasks to occasional couriers, who are willing to perform deliveries in exchange for a small reward as part of an already planned route. This reduces the overall number of trips, as delivery becomes part of an existing route. The recent literature addresses this issue using a variety of topics, e.g., crowdsourcing, crowd logistics, crowdshipping and crowd economy, lacking a comprehensive approach. Through a bibliographic investigation, this paper performs a literature review on the main crowd-based topics applied to city logistics and identifies the corresponding definitions present in academic literature. By means of this review, this paper aims to analyse similarities and differences of these topics, defining acceptable boundaries for each of them. The results show appropriate definitions about considered topics and outline topic boundaries and their hierarchical relations. Starting from this stage setting, the paper further outlines opportunities for researchers.