Dynamic Trip-Vehicle Dispatch with Scheduled and On-Demand Requests

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel dispatch algorithms for transportation services handling both scheduled and on-demand requests, utilizing a new CST-function to optimize vehicle routing and improve efficiency based on real-world data.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new CST-function and algorithms that simultaneously handle scheduled and on-demand ride requests, filling a gap in existing dispatch methods.

Findings

Algorithms outperform existing methods in real-world tests.

CST-function enables efficient computation of expected vehicle gains.

Effective handling of mixed request types improves dispatch efficiency.

Abstract

Transportation service providers that dispatch drivers and vehicles to riders start to support both on-demand ride requests posted in real time and rides scheduled in advance, leading to new challenges which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been addressed by existing works. To fill the gap, we design novel trip-vehicle dispatch algorithms to handle both types of requests while taking into account an estimated request distribution of on-demand requests. At the core of the algorithms is the newly proposed Constrained Spatio-Temporal value function (CST-function), which is polynomial-time computable and represents the expected value a vehicle could gain with the constraint that it needs to arrive at a specific location at a given time. Built upon CST-function, we design a randomized best-fit algorithm for scheduled requests and an online planning algorithm for on-demand requests given the scheduled requests as constraints. We evaluate the algorithms through extensive experiments on a real-world dataset of an online ride-hailing platform.