Combating the Bullwhip Effect in Rival Online Food Delivery Platforms Using Deep Learning

The wastage of perishable items has led to significant health and economic crises, increasing business uncertainty and fluctuating customer demand. This issue is worsened by online food delivery services, where frequent and unpredictable orders create inefficiencies in supply chain management, contributing to the bullwhip effect. This effect results in stockouts, excess inventory, and inefficiencies. Accurate demand forecasting helps stabilize inventory, optimize supplier orders, and reduce waste. This paper presents a Third-Party Logistics (3PL) supply chain model involving restaurants, online food apps, and customers, along with a deep learning-based demand forecasting model using a two-phase Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. Phase one, intra-day forecasting, captures short-term variations, while phase two, daily forecasting, predicts overall demand. A two-year dataset from January 2023 to January 2025 from Swiggy and Zomato is used, employing discrete event simulation and grid search for optimal LSTM hyperparameters. The proposed method is evaluated using RMSE, MAE, and R-squared score, with R-squared as the primary accuracy measure. Phase one achieves an R-squared score of 0.69 for Zomato and 0.71 for Swiggy with a training time of 12 minutes, while phase two improves to 0.88 for Zomato and 0.90 for Swiggy with a training time of 8 minutes. To mitigate demand fluctuations, restaurant inventory is dynamically managed using the newsvendor model, adjusted based on forecasted demand. The proposed framework significantly reduces the bullwhip effect, improving forecasting accuracy and supply chain efficiency. For phase one, supply chain instability decreases from 2.61 to 0.96, and for phase two, from 2.19 to 0.80. This demonstrates the model's effectiveness in minimizing food waste and maintaining optimal restaurant inventory levels.