Investigate exact reliability under limited time and space of a multistate online food delivery network

In recent years, especially during the outbreak of COVID-19, there have witnessed the emergence of online food delivery (OFD) services that allow customers to place orders via Internet-connected devices to obtain door-to-door delivered meals. In this service, on-time delivery to the right customer with high-quality fresh meals is deemed the primary factor. This paper investigates the reliability of OFD through its ability to meet customer needs in a specific context. During the delivery process, the courier receives the food at the store, packs it into a delivery box, and then delivers it to the customer. Note that, the delivery boxes are limited in space. Customers prefer having their orders delivered within a given time threshold. Thus, reliability is defined as the probability to complete non-integer and multiple orders under a limited time and space. Besides, the OFD system belongs to the gig economy, which allows couriers to select their shifts and working regions. Hence, the capacity of each region, which indicates the number of available couriers, is regarded as multistate. We, thus, construct the OFD system as a multistate online food delivery network (MOFN). Under the limitation of time and space, all feasible minimal capacity vectors are determined to compute the reliability. With the proposed investigation, managers can understand their MOFN’s ability to meet specific customer demands. Accordingly, they can make appropriate adjustments for better performance.