Meal delivery routing optimization with order allocation strategy based on transfer stations for instant logistics services

Abstract

Abstract The rapid development of instant logistics services has brought not only convenience to people's life but also a great challenge to traffic management. Due to the limited delivery range of instant delivery systems, customers are usually recommended the meals nearby or pay much higher delivery fees for long‐distance delivery. This study proposes a novel order splitting strategy based on transfer stations for long‐distance meal orders to satisfy the diverse customer demands. The meal delivery routing problem is addressed with an order allocation strategy based on transfer stations through developing a three‐stage modelling framework consisting of order combination, splitting and delivery routing for the online‐to‐offline instant logistics services. Normal meal orders are combined by the DBSCAN algorithm, and the cross‐regional long‐distance orders are split by transfer stations. Based on order combination and splitting, a mixed integer programming model is constructed for the meal delivery routing problem and solved by the adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm. The proposed algorithm converges quickly for the tested instances constructed based on real platform data. The proposed order allocation strategy can expand the delivery scopes of couriers effectively, stimulate more potential orders and guarantee the timeliness of meal delivery.