Labor-right Protecting Dispatch of Meal Delivery Platforms

Abstract: The boom in the meal delivery industry brings growing concern about the labor rights of riders. Current dispatch policies of meal-delivery platforms focus mainly on satisfying consumers or minimizing the number of riders for cost savings. There are few discussions on improving the working conditions of riders by algorithm design. The lack of concerns on labor rights in mechanism and dispatch design has resulted in a very large time waste for riders and their risky driving. In this research, we propose a queuing-model-based framework to discuss optimal dispatch policy with the goal of labor rights protection. We apply our framework to develop an algorithm minimizing the waiting time of food delivery riders with guaranteed user experience. Our framework also allows us to manifest the value of restaurants' data about their offline-order numbers on improving the benefits of riders.