A Personalized Service for Scheduling Express Delivery Using Courier Trajectories

With the increasing demand for express delivery, a courier needs to deliver many tasks in one day and it's necessary to deliver punctually as the customers expect. At the same time, they want to schedule the delivery tasks to minimize the total time of a courier's one-day delivery, considering the total travel time. However, most of scheduling researches on express delivery focus on inter-city transportation, and they are not suitable for the express delivery to customers in the “last mile”. To solve the issue above, this paper proposes a personalized service for scheduling express delivery, which not only satisfies all the customers' appointment time but also makes the total time minimized. In this service, personalized and accurate travel time estimation is important to guarantee delivery punctuality when delivering shipments. Therefore, the personalized scheduling service is designed to consist of two basic services: (1) personalized travel time estimation service for any path in express delivery using courier trajectories, (2) an express delivery scheduling service considering multiple factors, including customers' appointments, one-day delivery costs, etc., which is based on the accurate travel time estimation provided by the first service. We evaluate our proposed service based on extensive experiments, using GPS trajectories generated by more than 1000 couriers over a period of two months in Beijing. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.