The team of Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi has developed a solution named ‘Work4Food’ to provide fair compensation for food delivery agents and reduce the platform costs, officials said on Tuesday.
The proposed solution was recently presented at the prestigious International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The idea was developed by Abhijjnan Chakraborty, a professor at the computer science and engineering department of IIT-Delhi, PhD Scholar Anjali and Sayan Ranu and Amitabha Bagchi, professors at the same department.
As per the statement of the officials, the gig economy model has been a driving force in the food-delivery industry, making it problematic for the delivery agents to secure their rightful earnings. Additionally, food-delivery platforms have faced challenges in raising the delivery fees beyond a certain level, creating a complex dilemma for all the stakeholders engaged in this industry.
“We have developed an order-assignment algorithm (that determines which delivery agent gets which order) to ensure that each delivery person earns more than the minimum wage. To achieve this without increasing the cost for the platforms or the consumers, we recommend utilising the delivery workers more efficiently and reducing the habit of over-provisioning,” said Abhijjnan Chakraborty, a professor at the computer science and engineering department of IIT-Delhi.
“Since the platforms gather a lot of data, by looking at historical patterns, they can predict the supply-demand dynamics in a particular location at a particular time and accordingly, onboard delivery workers if there is a need,” he added.
Chakraborty said that Work4Food’s minimum income guarantee, backed with the flexibility it provides to the platforms in onboarding delivery agents based on the demand-supply graphics, reduces unwanted travel – a common practice among the delivery agents to strategically install themselves for the next order.
“This can have a long-term effect on reducing the air pollution caused by vehicular emissions, at least until the entire delivery fleet transitions to battery-operated vehicles. While online food-delivery companies often cite the gig nature of the work and operational constraints as barriers to implementing local minimum-wage guarantees, the novel solution promises to address the issues,” he said.
“We believe that our proposed solution has the potential to revolutionise the way food-delivery platforms operate in India, creating a win-win situation for all the parties involved – delivery workers, platforms and customers – representing a significant step toward achieving fairness and equity within the food-delivery industry’, Bagchi said.
