Reliable Crowdsourced Last Mile Delivery: Blockchain-Enabled Framework With Feedback

This paper addresses the challenges of Last Mile Delivery (LMD) in crowdsourced platforms under time and budget constraints. LMD service providers face a continuous increase in demand with limited resources, such as workers and budgets. With tasks that vary in urgency, limited resources often lead to task failures. Furthermore, the increasing number of requesters and workers complicates the governance of the LMD platform, making it difficult to maintain credibility, integrity, and transparency. Current LMD solutions generally focus on route optimization and service acceleration, overlooking the challenge of combined time-critical and budget-constrained tasks. This creates the need for an agile, accelerated, and decentralized LMD framework that can 1) handle tasks instantly upon submission, 2) motivate successful completion based on urgency, and 3) compensate for tasks with deficient budgets to fortify long-term success and avoid failure due to constrained resources. For this purpose, this paper introduces the first Blockchain Hybrid Crowdsourced Auction-based LMD framework (BHCA-LMD), which is designed to effectively manage time and budget constraints. Built on-chain for transparency and decentralization, the framework uses drones and ground vehicles as a hybrid delivery mode for their capabilities in speeding up deliveries. BHCA-LMD incorporates an auctioning system to alleviate failures due to limited budgets, with a feedback mechanism to prevent entities from abusing the platform’s profit for their benefit, ensuring the credibility and reliability of the framework. The evaluation shows an on-time task completion rate of up to 74% with the presence of malicious behavior and a 15% lower gas consumption compared to the closest benchmark.