Real-Time Dispatching of Large-Scale Ride-Sharing Systems: Integrating Optimization, Machine Learning, and Model Predictive Control

03/24/2020

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by   Connor Riley, et al.

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This paper considers the dispatching of large-scale real-time ride-sharing systems to address congestion issues faced by many cities. The goal is to serve all customers (service guarantees) with a small number of vehicles while minimizing waiting times under constraints on ride duration. This paper proposes an end-to-end approach that tightly integrates a state-of-the-art dispatching algorithm, a machine-learning model to predict zone-to-zone demand over time, and a model predictive control optimization to relocate idle vehicles. Experiments using historic taxi trips in New York City indicate that this integration decreases average waiting times by about 30 cases and reaches close to 55