A Study on Rider Assignment for Minimizing Travel Time in Delivery Platforms

Fast and reliable delivery service is essential for customer satisfaction. This study examines how food delivery platforms assign customer orders to riders. Although the most efficient method is to assign an order to the rider closest to the store, many platforms instead allow riders to self-select orders due to operational constraints. We compare the rider self-selection method with a centralized shortest-distance assignment method to evaluate efficiency. In addition, we investigate how variations in the exponential distribution of order arrivals influence assignment outcomes.<br/> Specifically, peak and off-peak hours are analyzed, and the shortest-distance assignment consistently outperforms rider self-select. It significantly reduces both rider assignment time and travel distance to the store. These results suggest that adopting improved assignment strategies can enhance delivery efficiency, optimize platform operations, and provide better service quality, offering practical implications for platform managers and policymakers. Experimental results show that in all scenarios with exponentially distributes order arrivals, the centralized shortest-distance assignment method outperforms the rider.