Delivery Scope: A New Way of Restaurant Retrieval For On-demand Food Delivery Service

Recently on-demand food delivery service has become very popular in China. More than 30 million orders are placed by eaters of Meituan-Dianping everyday. Delicacies are delivered to eaters in 30 minutes on average. To fully leverage the ability of our couriers and restaurants, delivery scope is proposed as an infrastructure product for on-demand food delivery area. A delivery scope based retrieval system is designed and built on our platform. In order to draw suitable delivery scopes for millions of restaurant partners, we propose a pioneering delivery scope generation framework. In our framework, a single delivery scope generation algorithm is proposed by using spatial computational techniques and data mining techniques. Moreover, a scope scoring algorithm and decision algorithm are proposed by utilizing machine learning models and combinatorial optimization techniques. Specifically, we propose a novel delivery scope sample generation method and use the scope related features to estimate order numbers and average delivery time in a period of time for each delivery scope. Then we formalize the candidate scopes selection process as a binary integer programming problem. Both branch&bound algorithm and a heuristic search algorithm are integrated in our system. Results of online experiments show that scopes generated by our new algorithm significantly outperform manual generated ones. Our algorithm brings more orders without hurt of users' experience. After deployed online, our system has saved thousands of hours for operation staff, and it is considered to be one of the most useful operation tools to balance demand of eaters and supply of restaurants and couriers.