How Uber Eats Uses Machine Learning to Estimate Delivery Times - The New Stack

Estimating the perfect times for drivers to pick up food delivery orders for a number of different restaurants can be one of the most difficult of computational problems. Think of it like the Traveling Salesperson NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problem: The customer wants food delivered in a timely manner, and the delivery person wants to food ready when they roll-up. If the estimates are off by even a tiny bit, then customers are unhappy and delivery people will work elsewhere. Yet, car-sharing service Uber is building a global service, called Uber Eats, that will rely on accurate predictions to succeed. The secret to its success will be machine learning, built from the company's in-house ML platform, nicknamed Michelangelo.