Optimizing Food Delivery
In densely populated areas like Manhattan there is a huge demand for restaurant delivery. This raises an issue for restaurant owners who have to figure out logistics for how to best handle this demand which includes hiring new people and figuring out routes. Not only is this hard on the managers but it is also a harsh system for the ridder’s for whom there is the possibility of accidents and tickets, accompanied by poor pay and a dependency on tipping. A company named Homer Delivery seeks to solve this issue by using technology to automatically optimize routes to get the highest efficiency and also provide the least overhead work for managers.
The situation can easily be described by a geographical map in which nodes are delivery locations and edges are the paths a delivery will take. The goal is that on you want to have the lowest possible amount of edges in which the delivery person is not actively delivering something. My best guess as to how Home Delivery decides upon an equilibrium is that it is a balance between the time it will take to deliver and the efficiency of the route. This is because you want the routes you are using to be as efficient as possible, but for customers to remain happy with your service you can not sacrifice too much time for the sake of creating a more efficient route.
By creating more efficient routing via software everybody benefits. Restaurant owners need only the software to manage their deliveries and less time spent making deliveries is less people the restaurants have to hire. For the delivery people they will be completing a higher number of deliveries which will hopefully result in a higher amount of tips. Finally on the customer side they will be receiving their food faster and more consistently than if unoptimized routes were being used.
Sources
Homer Delivery Website
http://www.zahncenternyc.com/startups/homerdelivery/
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