Last Mile: A Novel, Hotspot-Based Distributed Path-Sharing Network for Food Deliveries

Abstract

Delivery of items from the producer to the consumer has experienced significant growth over the past decade and has been greatly fueled by the recent pandemic. Amazon Fresh, GrubHub, UberEats, Postmates, InstaCart, and DoorDash are rapidly growing and are sharing the same business model of consumer items or food delivery. Existing food delivery methods are sub-optimal because each delivery is individually optimized to go directly from the producer to the consumer via the shortest time path. We observe a significant scope for reducing the costs associated with completing deliveries under the current model. For this, we model our food delivery problem as a multi-objective optimization, where consumer satisfaction and delivery costs, both, need to be optimized. Taking inspiration from the success of ride-sharing in the taxi industry, we propose DeliverAI - a reinforcement learning-based path-sharing algorithm. Unlike previous attempts for path-sharing, DeliverAI can provide real-time, time-efficient decision-making using a Reinforcement learning-enabled agent system. Our novel agent interaction scheme leverages path-sharing among deliveries to reduce the total distance traveled while keeping the delivery completion time under check. We generate and test our methodology vigorously on a simulation setup using real data from the city of Chicago. Our results show that DeliverAI can reduce the delivery fleet size by 15%, the distance traveled by 16%, and 50% higher fleet utilization w.r.t point-to-point delivery systems.