Self-Organization in Crowd-Sourced Food Delivery Systems

This paper presents an open-source agent-based simulation model to study crowd-sourced last-mile food delivery. Within this context, we focus on a system that allows couriers with varying degrees of autonomy and cooperativeness to make decisions about accepting orders and strategically relocating. We model couriers as agents in an agent-based simulation model implemented in NetLogo. Our approach provides the necessary parameters to control and balance system performance in terms of courier productivity and delivery efficiency. Our simulation results show that moderate levels of autonomy and cooperation lead to improved performance, with significant gains in workload distribution and responsiveness to changing demand patterns. Our findings highlight the potential of self-organizing and decentralized strategies to improve scalability, adaptability, and fairness in platform-based food delivery logistics.