The rapid expansion of online food delivery platforms has intensified the operational conflict between driver safety and platform revenue. Platforms’ tight delivery promises and order-based compensation result in drivers’ risky behaviors, which elevate accident rates and inflict harm on platforms. Existing research treats route planning and speed control separately and fails to capture the trade-offs between safety and revenue. To fill this gap, this paper develops an integrated routing and speed optimization framework from the platform perspective. We formulate the Safety–Revenue Harmonized Routing and Speed Optimization Problem (SRHRSP), which jointly determines order assignment, delivery routes, and speed profiles. Accident risk is measured by a Composite Risk Metric (CRM), defined as distance exposure multiplied by a convex power function of speed. We first prove the uniform-speed principle that for a fixed path and travel-time budget, a constant-speed profile minimizes CRM. We then formulate SRHRSP as a bi-objective model and solve its ε-constraint revenue-maximization form with a branch-and-price algorithm. Numerical experiments based on real delivery data show that a balanced operating policy can reduce expected accident risk by more than 80% while sacrificing approximately 10% of platform revenue. The driver team should maintain an appropriate size to harmonize risks and revenue. Finally, under stochastic order arrivals, we show that uniform workload distribution minimizes long-run system risk, and that state-dependent online dispatching policies such as join-the-shortest-queue achieve this harmonized state asymptotically.

Professor Zhao Qiuhong is a tenured Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing, China. She holds a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Beihang University and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Montreal. Her primary research interests include logistics and supply chain management, emergency management, and metaheuristics algorithms, etc.  Professor Zhao has led a wide range of research projects, including key, general, and youth projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, as well as numerous applied research projects commissioned by enterprises and public institutions. To date, she has published over 200 articles in academic journals and conference proceedings, such as European Journal of Operational Research, Omega, Computers & Operations Research, International Journal of Production Research, etc. In addition to her research, Professor Zhao serves as Director of the Emergency Management Systems Engineering Committee of the Systems Engineering Society of China and as a Standing Council Member of the China Logistics Society. She also holds several editorial positions, including Associate Editor of Sustainable Operations and Computers, Area Editor of Computers and Industrial Engineering, and editorial board member of the Journal of Beijing University of aeronautics and astronautics and Systems Engineering — Theory & Practice.