Solving Stochastic Online Food Delivery Problem via Iterated Greedy Algorithm With Decomposition-Based Strategy

Online food delivery (OFD) service has developed rapidly due to its great convenience for customers, the enormous markets for restaurants and the abundant job openings for riders. However, OFD platforms are encountering enormous challenges, such as massive demand, inevitable uncertainty and short delivery time. This article addresses an OFD problem with stochastic food preparation time. It is a complex NP-hard problem with uncertainty, large search space, strongly coupled subproblems, and high timeliness requirements. To solve the problem, we design an iterated greedy algorithm with a decomposition-based strategy. Concretely speaking, to cope with the large search space due to massive demands, a filtration mechanism is designed by preliminarily selecting suitable riders. To reduce the risk affected by the uncertainty, we introduce a risk-measuring criterion into the objective function and employ a scenario-sampling method. For timeliness requirements caused by short delivery time, we design two time-saving strategies via mathematical analysis, i.e., an adaptive selection mechanism to choose the method with less computational effort and a fast evaluation mechanism based on the small-scale sampling and machine learning model to speed up evaluation. We also prove an upper bound of the stochastic time cost under risk measurement as one of the baseline features to improve the prediction accuracy. The experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.