US Patent Issued to Maplebear on Aug. 12 for "Allocating shoppers for order fulfillment by an online concierge system accounting for variable numbers of shoppers across different time windows and varying capabilities for fulfilling orders" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,387,154, issued on Aug. 12, was assigned to Maplebear Inc. (San Francisco).

"Allocating shoppers for order fulfillment by an online concierge system accounting for variable numbers of shoppers across different time windows and varying capabilities for fulfilling orders" was invented by Houtao Deng (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Ji Chen (Mountain View, Calif.), Christopher Shey-Tau Sun (Atherton, Calif.), Yile Liu (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Yijia Chen (Oakland, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An online concierge system maintains a data store with discrete time intervals for fulfilling orders and information on shoppers categorized in a tree stru...