Urban crowd logistics, also known as last-mile crowdsourcing [1], consists in leaning on a group of citizens for completing the last-mile delivery of parcels in a city. This model answers the need to cope with the increased congestion in cities and the resultant problems of inefficiency and negative environmental impacts of local deliveries.
Other last-mile tasks include performing frequent checks of the display shelves at neighbourhood stores, delivering packages for consumers and reporting on the queuing wait times at various restaurants and food courts.
One interesting paper [2] discusses how to assign tasks to workers to avoid detours.
1: “http://www.logisticsarena.eu/crowdsourcing-for-the-last-mile/”
2: Chen C, Cheng S F, Gunawan A, et al. TRACCS: Trajectory-Aware Coordinated Urban Crowd-Sourcing[C]. Second AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP-14), 2014..