An Attention-Based Bi-GRU for Route Planning and Order Dispatch of Bus-Booking Platform

Yucen Gao, Yuanning Gao, Yuhao Li, Xiaofeng Gao, Xiang Li, Guihai Chen

Abstract: To cope with the high needs from passengers, especially for airports at night, we plan to develop a novel bus-booking platform, which can dispatch several passenger orders to one bus together. In this paper, we first give the formal definition of the Order Dispatch and Route Planning (ODRP) problem for the new bus-booking platform, and prove the ODRP problem is NP-hard. We then propose a new method based on attention mechanism and Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) to realize the tasks of order dispatch and route planning simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that uses main ideas of attention mechanism and Bi-GRU in order dispatch and route planning issues related to urban bus system. It can achieve the goal of increasing passenger number and reducing platform costs. Through experiments based on real-world data, we prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.