Dr. Stanislav Milkov Chankov

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Goal 12 is to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Encouraging more sustainable behaviour is vital for both environmental and social sustainability. This is a challenge that governments, businesses and NGOs have constantly sought to address. In general, sustainable consumption comes along with sacrifices in other areas such as comfort, time and money. However, the factors that influence sustainable consumption are not yet fully understood. It remains unclear how much consumers value sustainability and what trade-offs they are willing to make between sustainability factors (e.g. CO₂ emissions) and other factors (e.g. comfort, money and time). Moreover, for consumers to be able to make informed decisions, they need to have transparent information on the sustainability impact of the product or service they are purchasing. Thus, it is important to understand which sustainability visualization is the best in terms of inspiring more sustainable consumer behaviour.

One aspect that seems to be ignored in the last-mile delivery research and practice is the customer perspective on sustainable delivery. When E-commerce customers place online orders nowadays, they get the chance of choosing between different last-mile delivery options only based on economic factors. Information on the environmental and social impact of the different delivery options are currently not provided. Thus, even if E-commerce customers wanted to choose a more sustainable delivery, they are simply choosing the most convenient delivery in economic terms and ignoring any environmental and social impacts, as there is no transparent information on those.

The research of Stanislav Chankov builds on the theory of planned behaviour, which indicates that people can change their behaviour when a certain intervention occurs. Thus, the purpose of the research is to investigate if E-commerce customers change their preferred last-mile delivery, when they are provided with additional information on the sustainability impact of the available options. A stated preference survey (see image below) was conducted in which participants choose between last-mile delivery options before and after obtaining information on their environmental and social impact.

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The obtained results clearly showed that transparent information sharing makes E-commerce customers more likely to choose a more sustainable last-mile delivery.

Crowdsourced delivery refers to the crowdsourcing of package delivery to a network of individuals who deliver packages along their routes while using their underutilized assets such as the empty space in their cars or luggage. The crowdsourced last-mile delivery concept appears to be a sustainable solution to the last-mile problems as it can benefit all stakeholders involved in the delivery processes: (1) better customer service, extra revenue for crowd carriers, (2) profits for platform providers, (3) lower pressure on urban traffic system, and (4) lower environment footprint for the society.

In his research, Stanislav Chankov examined the performance of crowdsourced delivery by conducting an agent-based simulation study for package deliveries in Washington DC (see Image below). Two main parameters are studied: (1) supply/demand ratio, the ratio between the number of crowd couriers delivering packages and the number of packages and (2) maximum detour time accepted by crowd couriers. The findings suggest that high supply/demand ratio enables the crowd to achieve high service level with very little time spent on detour. Moreover, high levels of maximum detour time accepted by the crowd can increase service level when the supply/demand ratio is comparatively low.