Cost-Efficient Request Bundling for O2O Home Services

With the advent of mobile internet, Online-to-Offline (O2O) home services have emerged, such as home healthcare and repair services, greatly facilitating our lives. Customers book services through online platforms, and workers provide the requested services at the customers’ homes offline. However, each time workers travel to customers’ homes, they incur opportunity cost, leading to increased cost for home services. In this paper, we propose to bundle several O2O home service requests close to each other and match them with a worker. Therefore, requests that are in a bundle can split the worker’s opportunity cost. Specifically, we formalize the request bundling problem for O2O home services, which aims to minimize the overall cost of completing all requests while satisfying the time and Quality of Service(QoS) constraints. We present three Bi-layer Greedy request bundling(BiG) algorithms to solve it, including BiG-LEV, BiG-DIST, and BiG-COST. Besides, a cost accounting method based on Shapley value is designed to calculate the actual cost of each service for in-depth analysis. Finally, we illustrate a case of bundling requests for home healthcare services and compare the performance of the three algorithms.