Profit and Satisfaction Aware Order Assignment for Online Food Delivery Systems Exploiting Water Wave Optimization

Abstract

Online Food delivery, a specialized application of mobile crowdsourcing, has accelerated its popularity due to rushed urban lifestyle in recent times. The food delivery order assignment to workers that maximizes the service qualities, such as maximization of workers’ profit and minimization of order completion time to enhance the customer satisfaction at the same time, is a challenging problem. Existing works in the literature are limited either by focusing solely on minimizing order completion time or reduction of cost incurred in delivery of orders. In this paper, we develop a framework for optimal assignment of food delivery orders to workers as a multi-objective linear programming (MOLP) problem that makes a trade-off in between the worker profit and customer satisfaction. Due to NP-hardness of the above MOLP, a polynomial time solution of the food delivery problem has been developed, namely WWOFooD, exploiting Water Wave Optimization, a meta-heuristic algorithm. The WWOFooD not only explores ways of enhancing service quality of the customers, but also ensures giving additional incentives to the workers providing faster and reliable food delivery services. The results of simulation experiments depict that the WWOFooD offers competitive workers’ profit as well as significantly enhances customer satisfaction compared to the state-of-the-art works.

Keywords

• Mobile crowdsourcing
• food delivery
• profit maximization
• customer satisfaction
• water wave optimization