The Optimal Set of Orders and Courier Path for Food Delivery Services

Abstract

This study deals with the problem of determining the optimal order selection and courier route to maximize the profit for a limited delivery time. The mixed integer programming model is developed to solve this issue. Since this research problem is similar to the travelling salesman problem (TSP), it is considered an NP-hard (non-deterministic polynomial-time hard) problem. Hence, the time to find the optimal solution increases exponentially as the number of orders increases. To deal with this complexity, we develop three types of heuristic algorithms that can be used to solve real-world problems. Through various numerical experiments, we show that the developed algorithms perform well.