Single courier single restaurant meal delivery (without routing)

We investigate optimization models for meal delivery that do not involve routing. We focus on the simplest case, with a single restaurant and a single courier, and reduce it to the throughput maximization single machine scheduling problem, with release times and bounded slacks. In the meal delivery setting, slacks are small for QoS purposes and we indeed show that the scheduling problem can be solved in polynomial time when slacks are bounded. We discuss extensions to more couriers and restaurants. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.