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A Prescriptive Machine Learning Method for Courier Scheduling on Crowdsourced Delivery Platforms
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AI
DOI：10.1287/trsc.2022.1152.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Crowdsourced delivery platforms face the unique challenge of meeting dynamic customer demand using couriers not employed by the platform. As a result, the delivery capacity of the platform is uncertain. To reduce the uncertainty, the platform can offer a reward to couriers that agree to be available to make deliveries for a specified period of time, that is, to become scheduled couriers. We consider a scheduling problem that arises in such an environment, that is, in which a mix of scheduled and ad hoc couriers serves dynamically arriving pickup and delivery orders. The platform seeks a set of shifts for scheduled couriers so as to minimize total courier payments and penalty costs for expired orders. We present a prescriptive machine learning method that combines simulation optimization for off-line training and a neural network for online solution prescription. In computational experiments using real-world data provided by a crowdsourced delivery platform, our prescriptive machine learning method achieves solution quality that is within 0.2%-1.9% of a bespoke sample average approximation method while being several orders of magnitude faster in terms of online solution generation.
Keywords:
crowdsourced same-day delivery
machine learning
sample average approximation
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