Crowd-shipping depot location appears in Transportation Research Part E

A new paper has been published in Transportation Research Part E addressing depot location for crowd-shipping systems, where ordinary travelers are enlisted to carry parcels alongside their existing trips. Unlike traditional depot-location problems, crowd-shipping depots need to be placed with respect to the spatial distribution of available carriers, not just demand — a distinction that changes which formulations apply.

The paper introduces a continuum-approximation approach that treats carrier and demand density as continuous fields rather than discrete points, making it possible to derive near-closed-form guidance for depot placement at a city-wide scale without the computational cost of large mixed-integer formulations. The authors validate the approach against detailed discrete-event simulations of a hypothetical crowd-shipping network and show it matches simulated optimal placements closely while running orders of magnitude faster.