Vehicle routing optimization and algorithms for instant delivery under customer loss mechanism

Gaoming Cao and Weixiong Zha

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 7, 1-25

Abstract: In the field of instant delivery, the mismatch between delivery resources and customer demands has led to increasingly significant customer losses. To address this issue, this study introduces the customer loss mechanism and constructs an evaluation function to screen out resource-intensive customers, thereby clarifying the scope of delivery services. Based on this, this study establishes the vehicle routing optimization model under the customer loss mechanism with the objective of minimizing the sum of vehicle fixed costs, variable routing costs, and time window penalty costs. An improved genetic algorithm is employed to solve this model. Case study results demonstrate that the improved genetic algorithm outperforms traditional genetic algorithms and tabu search algorithms in convergence speed, optimization capabilities, and stability, reducing total delivery cost by 36.25% and 4.18%, respectively, with zero delivery violations. Regarding model performance, when proactively excluding 8.33% of customers, the total delivery cost is reduced by 17.18%, primarily driven by the reduction in fleet size. Furthermore, large-scale experiments reveal a pronounced leverage effect: excluding a mere 5% of marginal customers counter-intuitively reduces both fleet size and travel distance, while a 10% loss yields an 18.39% total delivery cost reduction with zero violations, proving that the mechanism precisely screens out inefficient nodes rather than arbitrarily rejecting them. Sensitivity analysis further confirms the model’s robustness across varying resource tightness, demonstrating that proactive customer loss is a feasible and effective strategy for improving resource utilization through precise resource focusing.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0345043

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0345043

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