Enhanced incentive schemes for volunteers to distribute surplus food in smart cities

Food wastage is a major problem in today’s world and the distribution of food surplus is undoubtedly one of the leading solutions to the problem. Surplus distribution is widely practised across the globe and there are several communities for the same as well. However, the success of these movements are determined by the active participation of volunteers. In addition, volunteer availability is an issue that is dependent on several different factors. An incentive module for the volunteers can normalize the availability of the volunteers. Such incentive modules are prone to identity duplication attacks and the implemented solutions do not really encourage volunteer hierarchical structures. In this paper, an incentive module that resists identity duplication and promotes the hierarchical structure between volunteers is presented. In addition, an improved matching module to match the food donors to the receivers utilizing the available volunteers optimally is also proposed. For the simulation, we have used real data taken from a real life smart city context, namely, we have used the OPEN DATA BARCELONA at https://opendata-ajuntament.barcelona.cat/data/en/dataset/est-cadastre-carrecs-us and cast it to our simulation settings using Python libraries. [Display omitted] •The modified food donor to receiver matching mechanism considers more volunteers.•An incentive mechanism is proposed for the volunteers for better participation.•Two methods for the disbursal of volunteer incentives are proposed.•One of the methods favours the volunteers in terms of a higher incentive amount.•The other method is resistant to identity duplication, thus favouring the system.