Promoting Riders’ Delivery Safety and Customer Satisfaction Through a Horizontal Collaboration Mechanism—An Optimization Approach Under Meals’ Preparation Delay

Online food delivery (OFD) is a prevalent business mode in cities. Besides customer satisfaction improvements, riders’ safety issues have received much attention. Overwhelming customer orders and merchants’ tardiness in preparing meals are two causes leading to road accidents, as the rider needs to absorb the meal delay on the route. To promote riders’ delivery safety, an order exchange and redispatch mechanism is proposed to establish a horizontal collaboration coordinated by OFD platform. The mechanism enables riders to return their undertaking order back to the OFD platform through smart phone when deem it necessary. Based on the real-time information collected from mobile devices, the OFD platform identifies potential riders then encourages them to intake the returned orders with an extra incentive. Several optimization models are formulated to describe the actions from different parties. A tailored Artificial Bee Conoly (ABC) algorithm is designed, which efficiently solves the order redispatch and pricing problems for platform. The collaboration mechanism is validated through extensive computational experiments, and the problem instances are created based on the data collected from one new town in Shanghai City. Managerial insights suggest that the extra incentive should be increased at a moderate level to balance the solution efficiency and quality.