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Towards Fair Workload Assessment via Homogeneous Order Grouping in Last-mile Delivery

Published: 17 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The popularity of e-commerce has promoted the rapid development of the logistics industry in recent years. As an important step in logistics, last-mile delivery from delivery stations to customers' addresses is now mainly finished by couriers, which requires accurate workload assessment based on actual efforts. However, the state-of-the-practice assessment methods neglect a vital factor that orders with the same customer's address (i.e., Homogeneous orders) can be delivered in a group (i.e., in a single trip) or separately (i.e., in multiple trips). It would cause unfair assessment among couriers if following the same rule. Thus, grouping homogeneous order accurately in the workload assessment is significant for achieving fair courier's workload assessment. To this end, we design, implement, and deploy a nationwide homogeneous order grouping system called FHOG for improving the accuracy of homogeneous order grouping in last-mile delivery for fair courier's workload assessment. FHOG utilizes the courier's reporting behavior for order inspection, collection, and delivery to identify homogeneous orders in the delivery station simultaneously for homogeneous order grouping. Compared with the state-of-the-practice method, our evaluation shows FHOG can effectively reduce order amounts with the higher and lower assessed courier's workload. We further deploy FHOG online in 8336 delivery stations to provide homogeneous order grouping service for more than 120 thousand couriers and 12 million daily orders. The results of the two surveys show that the couriers' acceptance rate is improved by 67% with FHOG after the promotion.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CIKM '22: Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management
      October 2022
      5274 pages
      ISBN:9781450392365
      DOI:10.1145/3511808
      • General Chairs:
      • Mohammad Al Hasan,
      • Li Xiong
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      Published: 17 October 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. last-mile delivery
      2. order grouping
      3. workload assessment

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      • (2024)Real-Time Insertion Operator for Shared Mobility on Time-Dependent Road NetworksProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3654621.365463317:7(1669-1682)Online publication date: 30-May-2024
      • (2024)DECO: Cooperative Order Dispatching for On-Demand Delivery with Real-Time Encounter DetectionProceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3627673.3680084(4734-4742)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2024
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