M2G4RTP: A Multi-Level and Multi-Task Graph Model for Instant-Logistics Route and Time Joint Prediction

Instant-logistics (e.g., food delivery and package pick-up) is increasingly calling for Route and Time Prediction (RTP), which aims to predict both future route and arrival time of a courier’s unvisited locations. Accurate RTP can greatly benefit the platform, such as optimizing order dispatching and improving user experience. Although recent years have witnessed various works for solving the RTP problem, they still suffer from the following three limitations: i) Failing to consider the high-level transfer mode of couriers between AOIs (Areas Of Interest, such as residential quarters or office buildings), which can help to build more accurate RTP. ii) Failing to simultaneously make the route and time prediction. Existing works either separately predict route/time or predict them in a two-step way. However, since route and time are strongly correlated (nearby locations in the route should have similar arrival times), jointly predicting them should be more effective. iii) The widely adopted tree-based or sequence-based architecture fails to fully encode the spatial relationship between different locations. To address the above limitations, we propose a multi-level and multi-task graph model, named M2G4RTP, for instant-logistics route and time joint prediction. Specifically, we propose a multi-level graph encoder equipped with a newly-designed GAT-e encoding module to capture couriers’ both high-level transfer modes between AOIs and low-level transfer modes between locations. Moreover, a multi-task decoder is presented to jointly predict the route and time at different levels. Finally, a loss weighting method based on homoscedastic uncertainty is designed to balance the two tasks adaptively. Extensive experiments on an industry-scale real-world dataset, as well as the online deployment on Cainiao Alibaba, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.