Urban mobility data has significant connections with economic growth and plays an essential role in various smart-city applications. Due to privacy concerns and substantial data collection costs, fine-grained human mobility trajectories are challenging to make publicly available on a large scale. A promising solution to address this issue is trajectory synthesizing, which generates synthetic trajectories that preserve aggregate spatiotemporal distributions. However, existing works often neglect the road network structural constraints or rely on instance-level external supervision, thus limiting their scalability in generating fine-grained and high-fidelity trajectories. In this paper, we propose Cardiff, a coarse-to-fine Cascaded hybrid diffusion-based framework for fine-grained and structure-plausible trajectory generation. By leveraging the hierarchical nature of urban mobility, Cardiff decomposes the generation process into two cascaded levels, i.e., discrete road segment-level and continuous fine-grained GPS-level: (i) At the segment level, to reduce computational costs and redundancy in raw trajectories, we first encode the discrete road segments into low-dimensional latent embeddings and design a diffusion transformer-based latent denoising network for segment-level synthesis. (ii) Taking the first stage of generation as conditions, we then design a fine-grained GPS-level conditional denoising network with a noise augmentation mechanism to achieve road-network-constrained and fine-grained generation. The cascaded progressive generation yields high-fidelity fine-grained trajectories while adhering to road geometry and topology constraints. Experimental results on three large real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in various metrics. The code is available at~ https://github.com/urban-mobility-generation/Cardiff.

Human behavior prediction is an essential AI-based task, which has inspired many real-world applications. In last-mile logistics, predicting couriers' behavior can benefit the couriers' preference learning and workflow optimization. In this paper, we devote to the behavioral prediction of courier workload and quantify their workload by the working time spent at each area of interest (AOI). Considering the behavior interpretability of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), existing studies have applied IRL to some real-world transportation prediction scenarios. However, in last-mile logistics, the platform assigns multiple orders to each courier, and couriers also receive new tasks in real-time, which additionally influence the couriers' subsequent decisions. The uncertainty in decision spaces and dynamic the workflow distribution make it more challenging to predict the couriers' working time. In this paper, we propose CourIRL, a practical IRL-based framework leveraging cross-attention to integrate Couriers' historical and spatio-temporal features to predict their future working time. CourIRL formulates the couriers' pick-up and delivery tour as a sequential decision-making process and designs a model-free IRL to learn decision-making preference vectors. A multi-head cross-attention mechanism-based deep regression model is proposed for fine-grained working-time prediction. The results of extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed CourIRL surpasses the state-of-the-art baselines by an average of 6.11% across settings, showing the efficacy and potential contributions of CourIRL in last-mile logistics.

In on-demand delivery,online orders are delivered by couriers from merchants to customers within a short time (e.g., 45 minutes). An important task is to provide an efficient order dispatching solution. Existing studies focus on scenarios with stable routing behavior using pre-determined courier-order matching before delivery while ignoring real-time dynamics during delivery. In this work, we leverage courier-courier encounter events as an opportunity to enable cooperative order dispatching (i.e., conducting order transfers among couriers during delivery) for better delivery efficiency. However, it is non-trivial to conduct encounter-aware cooperative order dispatching in real-time dynamics due to two major challenges: (i) the dynamic nature of encounters in diverse real-world scenarios, and (ii) global delivery efficiency optimization by local order transfers. To address the above challenges, we design a detection-driven cooperative dispatching framework, called DECO. Specifically, we design (i) a Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) variance-based state encoder to model encounter dynamics, (ii) an encounter event selector to choose encounter scenarios, (iii) a time-constrained order mask module to filter unsuitable orders, and (iv) an encounter-aware order transfer scheduler to make detailed order transfer decisions. Extensive experiments on real-world data from two large companies (i.e., JD Logistics, Eleme) show that DECO outperforms other baselines.Real-world deployment results at JD Logistics show that DECO improves the order overdue rate by 4.8%.

Logistics advertising is an emerging task in online-to-offline logistics systems, where logistics companies expand parcel shipping services to new users through advertisements on shopping websites. Compared to existing online e-commerce advertising, logistics advertising has two significant new characteristics: (i) the complex factors in logistics advertising considering both users' offline logistics preference and online purchasing profiles; and (ii) data sparsity and mutual relations among multiple steps due to longer advertising conversion processes. To address these challenges, we design MCAC, a Multi-task Conditional Attention network-based logistics advertising Conversion prediction framework, which consists of (i) an offline shipping preference extraction model to extract the user's offline logistics preference from historical shipping records, and (ii) a multi-task conditional attention-based conversion rate prediction module to model mutual relations among multiple steps in logistics advertising conversion processes. We evaluate and deploy MCAC on one of the largest e-commerce platforms in China for logistics advertising. Extensive offline experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in various metrics. Moreover, the conversion rate prediction results of large-scale online A/B testing show that MCAC achieves a 15.22% improvement compared to existing industrial practices, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Geocoding, associating textual addresses with corresponding GPS coordinates, is vital for many location-based services (e.g., logistics, ridesharing, and social networks). One of the most common Geocoding solutions is using commercial map services such as Google Maps. However, this is typically not practical for some location-based service providers due to real-world challenges like commercial competition and high costs (recurring fees). In this paper, we design a new cost-effective Geocoding framework to automatically infer the geographic coordinates from textual addresses. To achieve this, we take the E-Commerce logistics service as a concrete scenario and designCoMiner, an unsupervised coordinate inference framework based on textual address data, delivery event data, and courier trajectory data.CoMinerincludes three main components, (1) A POI-level clustering model, (2) A Delivery Mobility Graph (DMG), and (3) A behavior-driven address ranking model. Furthermore, we designCoMiner-W, a coordinates mining algorithm based on WiFi data, to further enhance the effectiveness ofCoMiner. We conduct extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets whereCoMineroutperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 20.3%. Moreover, we have designed an abnormal delivery event detection system based onCoMinerand deployed it at JD Logistics, which brings a significant reduction in abnormal delivery event rates.

The popularity of online e-commerce has promoted the rapid development of last-mile logistics in recent years. In last-mile services, to ensure delivery efficiency and enhance user experience, the delivery zone is proposed to perform delivery task assignment, which is a fundamental part of last-mile delivery. Each courier is responsible for one delivery zone. Couriers will collect orders belonging to their delivery zones from the delivery station and deliver orders to customers. Existing delivery zone partition practices in last-mile logistics consist of manual experience-based and static optimization-based methods, which perform order amount balancing among different zone but suffer from dissatisfaction and inefficiency because of two limitations: (i) using order amount is not always a good balancing metric considering deliveries' various difficulties (e.g., residence or industrial park, with or without elevators); (ii) less considering couriers' familiarity and preference behaviors. To generate delivery zone partition with equitable workload assignment, in this paper, we propose E-partition, a data-driven delivery zone partition framework to achieve equitable workload assignment in last-mile logistics. We first design a learning-based workload prediction model to estimate service time given a partition plan that consists of unseen courier-zone matching scenarios. Then, a delivery zone partition algorithm is proposed to iterative optimize couriers' core-AOI (i.e., area of interest) generation and AOI assignment process. Extensive offline experimental results show that our model outperforms baselines in working time prediction and workload balancing performances. Real-world deployment results at JD Logistics also verify the effectiveness of equitable-assignment aware delivery zone partition, with a 2.2% increase in service on-time rate compared to state-of-practice partition solutions.

In recent years, we have been witnessing a rapid prevalence of instant delivery services (e,g., UberEats, Instacart, and Eleme) due to their convenience and timeliness. A unique characteristic of instant delivery services is the concurrent dispatch mode, where (i) one courier usually simultaneously delivers multiple orders, especially during rush hours, and (ii) couriers can receive new orders when delivering existing orders. Most existing concurrent dispatch systems are efficiency-oriented, which means they usually dispatch a group of orders that have a similar delivery route to a courier. Although this strategy may achieve high overall efficiency, it also potentially causes a huge disparity of earnings between different couriers. To address the problem, in this paper, we design a Fairness-aware Concurrent dispatch system called FairCod, which aims to optimize the overall operation efficiency and individual fairness at the same time. Specifically, in FairCod, we design a Dynamic Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm with Fairness constrain (DA2CF). The basic idea is that it includes an Actor network to make dispatch decisions based on dynamic action space and a Critic network to evaluate the dispatch decisions from the fairness perspective. More importantly, we extensively evaluate our FairCod system based on one-month real-world data consisting of 36.38 million orders from 42,000 couriers collected by one of the largest instant delivery companies in China. Experimental results show that our FairCod improves courier fairness by 30.3% without sacrificing the overall system benefit compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

The popularity of e-commerce has promoted the rapid development of the logistics industry in recent years. As an important step in logistics, last-mile delivery from delivery stations to customers' addresses is now mainly finished by couriers, which requires accurate workload assessment based on actual efforts. However, the state-of-the-practice assessment methods neglect a vital factor that orders with the same customer's address (i.e., Homogeneous orders) can be delivered in a group (i.e., in a single trip) or separately (i.e., in multiple trips). It would cause unfair assessment among couriers if following the same rule. Thus, grouping homogeneous order accurately in the workload assessment is significant for achieving fair courier's workload assessment. To this end, we design, implement, and deploy a nationwide homogeneous order grouping system called FHOG for improving the accuracy of homogeneous order grouping in last-mile delivery for fair courier's workload assessment. FHOG utilizes the courier's reporting behavior for order inspection, collection, and delivery to identify homogeneous orders in the delivery station simultaneously for homogeneous order grouping. Compared with the state-of-the-practice method, our evaluation shows FHOG can effectively reduce order amounts with the higher and lower assessed courier's workload. We further deploy FHOG online in 8336 delivery stations to provide homogeneous order grouping service for more than 120 thousand couriers and 12 million daily orders. The results of the two surveys show that the couriers' acceptance rate is improved by 67% with FHOG after the promotion.

Geocoding, associating textual addresses with corresponding GPS coordinates, is vital for many location-based services (e.g., logistics, ridesharing, and social networks). One of the most common Geocoding solutions is using commercial map services (e.g., Google Maps) by uploading textual addresses to obtain corresponding coordinates. However, this is typically not practical for some location-based service providers due to real-world challenges like commercial competition and high costs (recurring fees). In this paper, we design a new cost-effective Geocoding framework to automatically infer the geographic coordinates from textual addresses for service providers. To achieve this, we take the E-Commerce logistics service as a concrete scenario and design CoMiner, an unsupervised coordinate inference framework based on textual address data, delivery event data, and courier trajectory data. There are three main components in CoMiner. (1) A POI-level clustering model by modeling customers' shopping patterns at different spatial granularities; (2) A Delivery Mobility Graph (DMG) by modeling couriers' delivery events and geographic coordinates; (3) A behavior-driven address ranking model by mining couriers' uncertain reporting behaviors to further infer coordinates on DMG. We extensively verify the performance of CoMiner with a three-phase evaluation from data-driven experiments to real-world deployment. (i) We conduct extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets where CoMiner achieves an average accuracy of 95.1%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 20.3%. (ii) We deploy CoMiner in JD Logistics, inferring coordinates for over 30 million addresses with an average accuracy of 93.3%. (iii) We utilize CoMiner for two Geocoding-based applications, i.e., parcel re-routing optimization and abnormal delivery event detection.

The emergence of Online-to-Offline (O2O) stores based on delivery platforms (e.g., Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Eleme) provides great convenience to people's lives. In the O2O model, one of the essential problems for merchants is to select a suitable store site, i.e., store site recommendation problem. We argue that the existing works for the traditional brick-and-mortar stores cannot address this problem due to two unique factors in the O2O model including (i) dynamic supply caused by courier capacity and dispatching strategies and (ii) various customer demands caused by delivery distance and customer preferences. To incorporate these new factors, we design$O^{2}$SiteRec, a store site recommendation method under the O2O model via multi-graph attention networks, which consists of (i) a courier capacity model based on a multi-semantic relation graph attention network to capture courier capacity; (ii) a heterogeneous multi-graph based recommendation model, where the courier capacity, customer preferences, and context features are fused. We evaluate our method based on one-month real-world data consisting of 39,465 stores and 23.6 million orders from one of the largest O2O platforms in China. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in various metrics.

Real-time Vehicle-of-Interest (VoI) detection is becoming a core application to smart cities, especially in areas with high accident rates. With the increasing number of surveillance cameras and the advanced developments in edge computing, video tasks prefer to run on edge devices close to cameras due to the constraints of bandwidth, latency, and privacy concerns. However, resource-constrained edge devices are not competent for dynamic traffic loads with resource-intensive video analysis models. To address this challenge, we propose RT-VeD, a real-time VoI detection system based on the limited resources of edge nodes. RT-VeD utilizes multi-granularity computer vision models with different resource-accuracy trade-offs. It schedules vehicle tasks based on a traffic-aware actor-critic framework to maximize the accuracy of VoI detection while ensuring an inference time-bound. To evaluate the proposed RT-VeD, we conduct extensive experiments based on a real-world vehicle dataset. The experiment results demonstrate that our model outperforms other competitive methods.