LaDe: The First Comprehensive Last-mile Delivery Dataset from Industry

Real-world last-mile delivery datasets are crucial for research in logistics, supply chain management, and spatio-temporal data mining. Despite a plethora of algorithms developed to date, no widely accepted, publicly available last-mile delivery dataset exists to support research in this field. In this paper, we introduce \texttt{LaDe}, the first publicly available last-mile delivery dataset with millions of packages from the industry. LaDe has three unique characteristics: (1) Large-scale. It involves 10,677k packages of 21k couriers over 6 months of real-world operation. (2) Comprehensive information. It offers original package information, such as its location and time requirements, as well as task-event information, which records when and where the courier is while events such as task-accept and task-finish events happen. (3) Diversity. The dataset includes data from various scenarios, including package pick-up and delivery, and from multiple cities, each with its unique spatio-temporal patterns due to their distinct characteristics such as populations. We verify LaDe on three tasks by running several classical baseline models per task. We believe that the large-scale, comprehensive, diverse feature of LaDe can offer unparalleled opportunities to researchers in the supply chain community, data mining community, and beyond. The dataset homepage is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Cainiao-AI/LaDe.

An end-to-end predict-then-optimize clustering method for intelligent assignment problems in express systems

Express systems play important roles in modern major cities. Couriers serving for the express system pick up packages in certain areas of interest (AOI) during a specific time. However, future pick-up requests vary significantly with time. While the assignment results are generally static without changing with time. Using the historical pick-up request number to conduct AOI assignment (or pick-up request assignment) for couriers is thus unreasonable. Moreover, even we can first predict future pick-up requests and then use the prediction results to conduct the assignments, this kind of two-stage method is also impractical and trivial, and exists some drawbacks, such as the best prediction results might not ensure the best clustering results. To solve these problems, we put forward an intelligent end-to-end predict-then-optimize clustering method to simultaneously predict the future pick-up requests of AOIs and assign AOIs to couriers by clustering. At first, we propose a deep learning-based prediction model to predict order numbers on AOIs. Then a differential constrained K-means clustering method is introduced to cluster AOIs based on the prediction results. We finally propose a one-stage end-to-end predict-then-optimize clustering method to assign AOIs to couriers reasonably, dynamically, and intelligently. Results show that this kind of one-stage predict-then-optimize method is beneficial to improve the performance of optimization results, namely the clustering results. This study can provide critical experiences for predict-and-optimize related tasks and intelligent assignment problems in express systems.