Provably high-quality solutions for the meal delivery routing problem

Abstract

Online restaurant aggregators with integrated meal delivery networks have become more common and more popular in the past few years. Meal delivery is arguably the ultimate challenge in last-mile logistics: a typical order is expected to be delivered within an hour (much less if possible) and within minutes of the food becoming ready. We introduce a novel formulation for a meal delivery routing problem (in which we assume perfect information about order arrivals) and develop a simultaneous column- and row-generation method for its solution. The analysis of the results of an extensive computational study, using instances derived from real-life data, demonstrates the efficacy of the solution approach, and provides valuable insights into, among others, the (potential) benefits of order bundling, courier-shift scheduling, and demand management.