Provably High-Quality Solutions for the Meal Delivery Routing Problem
Barış Yıldız
Industrial Engineering Department, Koç University

Abstract
Online restaurant aggregators with integrated meal delivery networks have become more common and more popular in the past few years. Meal delivery is arguably the ultimate challenge in last mile logistics: a typical order is expected to be delivered within an hour (much less if possible), and within minutes of the food becoming ready. We introduce a novel formulation for a meal delivery routing problem (in which we assume perfect information about order arrivals), and develop a simultaneous column and row generation method for its solution. The analysis of the results of an extensive computational study, using instances derived from real-life data, demonstrates the efficacy of the solution approach, and provides valuable insights into, among others, the (potential) benefits of order bundling, courier shift scheduling, and demand management.

Short Bio
Barış Yıldız has got his Ph.D. from Bilkent University Industrial Engineering Department in 2016. He holds an M.S. degree in Operations Research from U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a B.S. degree in Systems Engineering from Turkish Army Academy. After working as an operations research analyst at Turkish General Staff HQ during 2011-2016, he joined Koc University Industrial Engineering Department in 2016 as a faculty member. His research focuses on network design problems and their applications in telecommunication and transportation networks.

Venue
Friday, December 7, 2018 at 4.00 pm in IE03