Implementing Customizable Online Food

Ordering System Using Web Based

Application
Hitesh Jha, Prinesh Bansal, Pravin Deshatwar and Anshul Gupta

Computer Department,Mumbai University

Mumbai, Maharashtra,India

Abstract
In the last few years, there have been many types of hyperlocal food delivery start-ups which
have increased the competition in this growing sector. These start-ups are encouraged by the
interest of mainstream industries to invest in this field. They have to be pretty efficient in their
whole process to be in profit or they have a threat of close down due to competition from other
companies or loss of interest from the investor. But the main issue of FD start-ups are real world
issues such as optimum delivery time, no degradation in quality, traffic on routes, etc. We will
solve this issue by making all the variable parameters giving approximately constant outputs. We
will also modify the delivery system so that order from two different houses to two different
restaurants on two different times get delivered by a delivery person instead of two. This will
done by taking into consideration distance between houses, between restaurants, between
house and restaurant, time difference in ordering, type of food, etc. Then it will be extended to
optimize this process for more than two houses or restaurants. The conclusion will be to make
the process of delivery system more efficient and maximizing the profit.

INTRODUCTION
Numerous advancements have been made in the field of web technology and mobile application
development during the past decade. As a result many sophisticated applications and web
services have been created which cater to a wide variety of industries and consumers alike. Food
industry is one of such industries. Whether it be food manufacture and processing to wholesale
and distribution, various aspects of the industry have started integrating such web services in
their processes. We, however, are going to focus on the distribution part, more specifically the
distribution of culinary products, that is, food created by restaurants.

Over the past couple of years, many apps have been created, which are used to take orders from
the customers online and send them to the restaurants to reduce the trouble a customer has to
go through to place an order. Some restaurants have their own apps whereas some rely on a
proxy service or app to take their orders. While all of these apps have their own unique features
and user interface, these apps have the core task to make the process of generating and
dispatching orders as efficient as possible.

These apps are indisputably an improvement over the old method of placing order via calling, as
now the customer can take his time in placing the order and consider his options with ease as
the menu is available online. The customer can also order food to be delivered at a certain time.

However, due to the increasing popularity of such web apps and services, the number of people
using them as also increased strikingly to a large extent. This has led to the emergence of
another problem. While the restaurants now receive orders easily, due to the limited number of
staff (that is the cooks and the delivery people) the orders received are not created and
dispatched in a timely manner. This can lead to numerous mishaps. Examples of such mishaps
are late delivery of the order, misplacement of certain items and sometimes the food itself is
spoilt as it has been in hurry. Such mishaps can cause irreparable damage to the restaurants
reputation and finances.

Over the years, many apps have tried to solve this problem, but none of these apps have
managed to create an effective solution which can solve this problem without causing lose to the
restaurant or increasing the frustration of the customer.

In order to solve this problem efficiently, we plan on using graph theory and certain graph
algorithms such prims and kruskals which are collectively known as greedy algorithms, and later
see the improvements that can be made to these algorithms to create a robust solution that can
be applied to a real world scenario.

Improving efficiency of delivery routes using graph theory

Application

Algorithm and Data Structure

There are many food delivering apps which operate and function differently from each other.
Some make their own food and deliver, some pick up food from restaurants and deliver, some
just take up the order and let the restaurant deliver their food, and some pick up food from
homes and deliver. They use different delivering techniques and algorithm to accept the order
and deliver it in a promised time. The apps which make their own food and deliver are more
time efficient but lack much variety and those who pick-up from other restaurants and homes
take more time but provide a larger variety. The delivery patterns are also different from each
other like some deliver from restaurants to house using Gps tracking available live to the
customer and one order is delivered by one delivery person to one house which makes tracking
very effective and more user friendly but they fail in some aspects like when two orders are
made to the same restaurant from the same customer, two different delivery persons are
assigned to deliver from the same restaurant to the same house from the same route which is
not effective as one delivery person can be used instead of two. Some which make their own
food and deliver are time efficient but lack food quality and variety as they have to manage
everything from making of food and delivering it and this requires a lot of expenditure which
does not translate in the amount of orders to make that amount of profit so they cook food at
one time and microwave it when ordered and deliver the pre-made heated food which degrades
the quality of food and takes the health and taste of customer at risk. Those which provide
consumers with homemade food and they pick-up food from homes making the ordered food
and delivering the food to the destination homes. But the process requires the app to receive
the order from one home and delivering it to destination home, and it is done directly (rare
cases) or by picking up the order and bringing it up to a transition location from where it will be
delivered to the destination home by some other delivery person or the same one.

We will solve these problems one by one and provide a solution

and modify the process to improve the process. First let us consider the time management
problem, it can be minimized in the case of restaurant to home delivery apps by asking amount
of time required by the restaurant at the time of accepting or rejecting the order. This amount of
time will be added to the total time required for delivering the order. The total time will be
shown to the customer. The bigger issues are reducing the time for delivery and optimizing the
amount of delivery persons required to deliver the order to many customers. For this pickup and
delivery planning with transfers method can be used to overcome and the routes are to be
planned using the graph theory. For apps delivering from restaurants to customers, the delivery
persons are salaried from the delivering company and the delivery person is decided to pick-up
and deliver the food according to the location where they are (generally at their own homes)
and those who are nearer to the restaurant are selected and given the location of restaurant and
customer location. This is not efficient as after the delivery is done, the person will either return
to the source restaurant or owns home. Instead the delivery persons can be given rerouting to
another restaurant from where another order can be picked up and delivered to another
customer. This will greatly decrease the amount of time and space and number of delivery
persons. The rerouting process is handled by the graph theory consisting of different algorithms
which minimize the origin to destination delivering process. We also consider time as a
parameter and less distance does not practically mean less time as the real world problems like
traffic are added. So, minimizing the distance algorithms are added with the time parameter and
solved by the cumulative less of both. First the routing process uses Prims or Kruskals algorithm
considering multiple restaurants and houses as vertices and the routes between them (also
created using greedy algorithms) as edges and connecting the orders one after the other. The
routing process has time limitations and different routes are added according to the time the
order has been made and processing time. If the order adheres to the required parameters then
the new locations are added as the vertices and the routes are planned accordingly. If two
delivery persons are available then the one which will be more fit to the task at hand according
to the distance and time guidelines has the vertex added to the persons route and the rerouting
process begins and it is done by the same greedy algorithms. If we consider a situation in which
the order is cancelled by a customer, instead of changing the whole route, we consider the
processes not getting affected remain the same and rerouting only the required affected region
of the process. We can also see transfer as a viable option according to which one order can be
passed through deliver persons and making the amount of delivery persons and the space and
time to be minimized. It will raise some issues like handling of the order, tracking and confusion
for the customer, but it is not much of a concern as it could easily be overcame by proper
handling and switching the location pointers available to the customer from the previous
delivery person to the current person in-charge. The apps taking homemade orders can take the
help of the restaurant to home delivering apps by equating the required time to make the orders
by the origin homes to the delivery person reaching their houses. This will solve the problem of
time by home to home delivering apps. The problem of apps making their own food and
delivering them having not the desired quality of food arises due to having more branches in a
relatively small area which can have one instead of multiple branches. They can use that
expenditure to cook food twice or thrice a day and cooking more options and delivering taking
the use of above mentioned delivering solutions and use of transfers which will be much more
handy. Another solution is not having to remove branches instead making a central branch
making all their food and delivering to the child branches, this will add the time and distance in
the equation but it will solve the quality issue which is the only parameter which this system
lacks. We could also use a bigger vehicle to travel and deliver between the branches and making
them deliver any other type of commodity also to reduce the extra cost. The algorithms which
will be used to bring all these processes into implementation and graph theory which will be
critical in solving the routing and rerouting of paths will be critical.

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