A Deep Learning Method for Route and Time Prediction in Food Delivery Service

Online food ordering and delivery service has widely served people's daily demands worldwide, e.g., it has reached a number of 34.9 million online orders per day in Q3 of 2020 in Meituan food delivery platform. For the food delivery service, accurate estimation of the driver's delivery route and time, defined as the FD-RTP task, is very significant to customer satisfaction and driver experience. In the paper, we apply deep learning to the FD-RTP task for the first time, and propose a deep network named FDNET. Different from traditional heuristic search algorithms, we predict the probability of each feasible location the driver will visit next, through mining a large amount of food delivery data. Guided by the probabilities, FDNET greatly reduces the search space in delivery route generation, and the calculation times of time prediction. As a result, various kinds of information can be fully utilized in FDNET within the limited computation time. Careful consideration of the factors having effect on the driver's behaviors and introduction of more abundant spatiotemporal information both contribute to the improvements. Offline experiments over the large-scale real-world dataset, and online A/B test demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed FDNET.