Coupang's Spatial Index-Based Delivery Management System for Rocket Delivery

The existing postal code-centered delivery management could not keep up with Coupang's rapid growth and complex operations. As daily delivery volume increased, a single postal code needed to be split into multiple serviceable zones, but with text addresses alone it was difficult to intuitively view and modify zone boundaries.

To solve this problem, starting in 2021 Coupang designed a system that lets delivery zones be visualized and edited directly on a map. There were three core requirements.

• Delivery zones must be easily viewable on a map
• Relevant stakeholders must be able to create, modify, and share zones
• Management must be based on consistent spatial data, not postal codes and text addresses

As a solution, Coupang adopted H3-based hexagonal spatial indexing. It first reviewed GIS-family spatial indexing systems and found that W3W, while convenient for conveying locations verbally using a 3m square grid, had the limitation of not being able to adjust resolution. In contrast, Google S2 and Uber H3 are immutable spatial indexing systems with a parent-child hierarchy, allowing grid levels to be flexibly chosen according to purpose and scale.

Among these, Coupang chose H3 because the hexagon shape itself has less distortion and can represent the same area with fewer grid cells. S2's square-family grids have relatively greater distance and area distortion, whereas H3's centroids are distributed across each hexagon, making spatial representation more stable. However, Coupang also considered H3's characteristics, such as parent grids not fully physically covering their child grids, and the pentagon exceptions that appear in places like oceans.

In the actual delivery zone design, grid resolution was important. Level 12 H3, at about 300㎡, was not sufficient to distinguish blocks divided by roads and adjacent buildings, so Coupang chose Level 14 H3 to raise precision to about 6.3㎡. At this level, precise locations such as entrances or mailboxes can be expressed instead of using latitude and longitude.

As a result, Coupang has built a foundation for managing delivery zones as map-based spatial indexes, rather than tying them to text addresses. This allows zones to be divided more finely, lets field staff modify them directly, and enables handling the statistics and metrics needed for optimization together.