Relay — Last-Mile Spoilage Trap

Project Description

Relay is a web-based food rescue and last-mile logistics coordination platform designed to reduce the wastage of time-sensitive donated food and supplies. It connects donors, volunteer riders, and shelters through a centralized system that manages donations, delivery assignments, shelter demand, and operational monitoring.

The platform addresses the challenge of ensuring that donated resources reach suitable destinations before their safety deadlines. Its intelligent-in-logic, rule-based dispatch engine evaluates rider availability, carrying capacity, geographic distance, shelter requirements, available demand, and estimated delivery times to generate feasible delivery plans.

Relay supports the complete delivery lifecycle, from donation creation and rider assignment to pickup, transit, and successful delivery. It also handles operational failures such as unresponsive riders, expired claims, unavailable shelters, and missed deadlines through automated reservation release, destination rerouting, and recovery-batch planning.

The platform features an administrator Operations Console that provides real-time-style operational monitoring, including delivery statistics, rider availability, shelter capacity, an interactive map, active assignments, and an event stream. A simulated clock and predefined demonstration scenarios allow users to test deadline constraints, allocation failures, rider unavailability, and recovery workflows without relying on physical delivery infrastructure.

Built using Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, and a browser-based HTML, CSS, and JavaScript interface, Relay emphasizes data integrity, transactional consistency, role-based access control, and reliable state management. Its database constraints and automated tests help preserve inventory accounting and prevent conflicting assignments.

The primary objective of Relay is to make time-sensitive donation distribution more reliable, transparent, and accountable by combining rule-based dispatch planning, operational monitoring, and automated failure handling in a single software platform.