An Incentive framework for surplus food distribution in the context of smart cities

Abstract

Food donation is an absolute necessity for today’s society in order to counter the wastage of edible food. The key to this food movement is volunteer availability which aids in delivering the surplus food to a geographically distant receiver audience. Incentives attract a greater participation of volunteers who contribute to a greater food mobility. In this paper, we present a recursive incentive generation mechanism that helps to increase volunteer participation. This stabilizes the availability of volunteers which helps the main matching module to perform better in terms of matches produced and geographical area covered. We propose two mechanisms for this. The first one provides a solid foundation for the incentive structure while the second one improves it by providing significant financial benefits to the platform so that it could be better sustainable. We evaluate them with simulations carried out for both the mechanisms. The simulation results presented later show that while the former mechanism does ensure a hard upper limit on costs, the latter provides significant savings over it. Analytical results are also presented to ensure that the incentive distribution is within the available budget.