MRGRP: Empowering Courier Route Prediction in Food Delivery Service with Multi-Relational Graph

TL;DR

This paper introduces MRGRP, a multi-relational graph-based model that significantly improves courier route prediction accuracy in food delivery services by capturing complex task relationships and courier preferences.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Multi-Relational Graph model with a specialized architecture and route decoder, enhancing route prediction accuracy over existing methods.

Findings

Achieved state-of-the-art route prediction accuracy of 0.819.

Outperformed heuristic algorithms in real-world deployment.

Validated effectiveness across cities of various sizes.

Abstract

Instant food delivery has become one of the most popular web services worldwide due to its convenience in daily life. A fundamental challenge is accurately predicting courier routes to optimize task dispatch and improve delivery efficiency. This enhances satisfaction for couriers and users and increases platform profitability. The current heuristic prediction method uses only limited human-selected task features and ignores couriers preferences, causing suboptimal results. Additionally, existing learning-based methods do not fully capture the diverse factors influencing courier decisions or the complex relationships among them. To address this, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-based Route Prediction (MRGRP) method that models fine-grained correlations among tasks affecting courier decisions for accurate prediction. We encode spatial and temporal proximity, along with pickup-delivery relationships, into a multi-relational graph and design a GraphFormer architecture to capture these complex connections. We also introduce a route decoder that leverages courier information and dynamic distance and time contexts for prediction, using existing route solutions as references to improve outcomes. Experiments show our model achieves state-of-the-art route prediction on offline data from cities of various sizes. Deployed on the Meituan Turing platform, it surpasses the current heuristic algorithm, reaching a high route prediction accuracy of 0.819, essential for courier and user satisfaction in instant food delivery.