NTU-CEE Seminar Series: Dr. Fangni Zhang

Organized By

CEE Seminar Committee

Host By

Associate Professor Wang Zhiwei & Associate Professor Zhu Feng

Topic

Mechanism Design and Collaborative Routing for Urban Crowdshipping Systems

About the Seminar

The rapid growth of e-commerce and urban logistics demands innovative last-mile delivery solutions. Crowdshipping using non-professional travelers (crowd couriers) to deliver parcels offers flexibility and cost savings but poses challenges in task allocation and incentive design. This talk presents findings from two studies addressing these issues.

The first focuses on auction-based mechanisms for task allocation and pricing, applying the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to ensure fair and efficient outcomes. To enhance scalability, a greedy approximation algorithm is proposed with strong theoretical guarantees.

The second study introduces a collaborative routing model where crowd couriers and professional drivers work together. An adaptive optimization algorithm minimizes delivery costs while respecting crowd couriers' personal travel constraints.

Together, these studies offer practical insights for designing scalable, cost-effective, and smart crowdshipping platforms to improve urban delivery systems.

About the Speaker

Dr. Fangni Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Data and Systems Engineering at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). She received her B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Beihang University and Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prior to joining HKU, Dr. Zhang has been a Lecturer at the University of Leeds and University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on the economics, analytics, and optimization of multimodal transportation systems, in particular the planning, operations, and management issues of shared, automated, and electrified transportation and logistics systems. Dr. Zhang’s research mainly appears in leading international journals, including Transportation Research Part A/B/C/D/E, Transportation Science, and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

She is currently serving as the Associate Editor of Journal of Transport Economics and Policy and a member of Editorial Advisory Board of Transportation Research Part E. As the Principal Investigator, Dr. Zhang has won several competitive grants from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).

Registration

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