A Novel Air Delivery Approach Using Crowdshipping and Commercial Flights

In this paper, we propose a crowdshipping application that focuses on using commercial airlines as a mean of transportation to reduce worldwide air-fuel consumption by using the available resources. We achieve this by creating a generic crowdshipping business model that reflects all the domains needed for a successful application. A process flow and two mathematical models were developed: Integer Programming (IP) to ensure the customers-travelers matching and Goal Programming (GP) to investigate the effect of relaxing some the constraints. The work was tested on the North African countries region which are characterized by a variety in travelers, airports, and airport distributions. It was shown that the greater the ratio of travelers to the customers, the fewer deviations were needed and the higher the packages distribution among the travelers is achieved. This study demonstrates that as the network becomes broader, big data analytics and faster matches are required to secure the scalability of the application.