RE-ORG: An Online Repositioning Guidance Agent

Muralidhar Konda, Pradeep Varakantham, Aayush Saxena, Meghna Lowalekar

Abstract: Continuous matching of supply and demand through online/real-time decision making is a problem of critical importance in many urban environments. Examples include bike/scooter sharing systems, car sharing, food/ grocery delivery, smart vending machines and other similar aggregation systems. In these systems, apart from supply (e.g., bikes/scooters, cars, restaurants/supermarkets) and demand (e.g., customers), there may also be matching resources that help match supply and demand (e.g., trucks, car drivers, delivery boys). The success of these systems depends on the ability to have supply available at the "right" locations at the "right" time. The matching decisions taken by the company operators are typically performed based on the current status of supply, demand and location of matching resources. In this paper, we present RE-ORG (Repositioning agEnt for Online spatio-tempoRal matchinG problems) to provide guidance for matching resources to have supply at the right locations at the right time to serve demand. Apart from providing the guidance on matching decisions, RE-ORG also provides a real time status of the supply, demand and matching resources.