Two-Stage Solution for Meal Delivery Routing Optimization on Time-Sensitive Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

The online-to-offline (O2O) meal delivery mode in which takeout meals are ordered online and delivered offline is recently emerging. The fast delivery of huge meal orders for time-sensitive customers imposes great challenges on O2O meal delivery platforms. This study establishes a two-stage solution for meal delivery routing optimization with the objective of maximizing time-sensitive customer satisfaction. In the first stage, a large number of meal orders are hierarchically classified and merged into delivery bundles based on the nearest pickup location rule by applying the hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) algorithm, to increase fast meal delivery efficiency. In the second stage, a genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to solve the cluster-based delivery routing optimization model to find an optimal delivery route for meal orders in each delivery bundle. The numerical simulation results verify that the two-stage routing optimization solution is effective to schedule timely meal delivery and improve customer time satisfaction. The comparison of the results indicates the superiority of the proposed two-stage solution with HAC and GA on customer satisfaction while ensuring the delivery of all orders within 60 minutes. The sensitivity analysis shows the impact of time-sensitive customer heterogeneity on meal delivery satisfaction. This research has significant managerial insights for fast delivery services of O2O meal delivery platforms.