A New Urban Take-away Centralized Distribution Mode for Online Meal Ordering Platform

With the development of Internet and ecommerce, take-away O2O industry has developed rapidly. Direct distribution is to deliver a meal from restaurant to a customer’s home, which often suffers delays during mealordering peak time and incurs customers’ dissatisfaction. This paper focuses on reducing delays in the process of distribution so as to improve distribution efficiency. We propose a new urban take-away centralized distribution mode that involves location problem and vehicle routing problem. Aimed at the two peaks of take-away distribution, the mode chooses the right location to set up the take-away distribution stations that collect meals distributed to here. Through a realistic example based on the student’s meal demand and the distribution network of Beijing Jiaotong University, we demonstrate that the urban take-away centralized distribution mode can efficiently reduce delays, and, meanwhile, decrease the total distribution cost.