CCC (Contingent Cycle Courier) is a novel logistics concept where physical goods are distributed/shipped towards destinations by only harnessing accidental carrying power of people on bicycles in a city. The travel routes of the goods can involve multiple different personnel; in other words, parcels hitchhike onto people's movements.

Ideally, couriers in the CCC network should not even notice if they are carrying anything, but in a realistic scenario, having a simple set of instructions is inevitable.

In order to solve the multi-hop ride matching problem, we introduced a grid system with direction indicators to facilitate the contingent feeling of suddenly being approached by mango parcels on the street.

The CCC lab was held at Border Sessions festival 2019 in The Hague on 13th June (Thurs). There were 10-12 participants, conducting a couple of ourdoor experiments around The Grey Space in the Middle.

The project was kindly supported by Dr. Heide Lukosch and Linda van Veen from Gamelab, Dr. Xiao Lin and Prof. Lori Tavasszy from Freight & Logistics Lab, TU Delft.

Based on the experiment, Dr. Xiao Lin wrote a research paper titled "Performance and Intrusiveness of Crowdshipping Systems: An Experiment with Commuting Cyclists in The Netherlands". This was published in the open access journal MDPI Sustainability in September 2020.

How to make 1 Mango Equivalent Unit (MEU)

Photo: Joost Weddepohl