A Workload-Balancing Order Dispatch Scheme for O2O Food Delivery with Order Splitting Choice

Abstract

Online-to-offline (O2O) food delivery service refers to an emerging modern business model that enables customers to order foods from local restaurants via an online platform, and then receive and enjoy them offline after the delivery, offered by couriers. Such service, discussed in this article, specifies that a customer can order from multiple restaurants in a single order and choose for them to be delivered together or separately, whereas the commonly discussed mode only permits placing an order in one restaurant at once. In this service, one crucial issue is how to dispatch these orders to couriers for offline delivery. For this, we propose a new three-stage order dispatch scheme, namely, pseudo-assign first, re-route second, and courier selection last, aiming to deliver the orders in time and balance the couriers’ workload. Due to the dynamism and uncertainty inherently involved in this issue, we also take responsiveness to future demands and robustness into consideration when making the dispatch. Compared with existing approaches, the new one significantly balances the couriers’ workload and, meanwhile, keeps good performance in delay rate, making the decisions more practical. Furthermore, this study analyzes the influence of customers’ preference for order splitting and number of couriers on the efficiency of the distribution system, thereby interesting managerial insights for O2O food delivery are revealed.

A Matching Algorithm with Reinforcement Learning and Decoupling Strategy for Order Dispatching in On-Demand Food Delivery

“…Cosmi et al [6,7] modeled the OFD problem with one rider and one restaurant as a single machine scheduling problem, which was formulated into mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models, and optimized by a dynamic programming algorithm [6] and optimizer Gurobi [7] ; for the similar scenario, Yu et al [8] derived the lower bounds for various rider capacities and designed two dispatching algorithms to minimize the delay. For a special OFD scenario where a customer could order meals from multiple restaurants, Steever et al [9] built an MILP model and designed two heuristics, and Wang et al [10] proposed a three-stage order dispatch scheme that outperformed the heuristics in Ref. [9].…”