Optimal Trip-Vehicle Dispatch with Multi-Type Requests

Taoan Huang, Bohui Fang, Hoon Oh, Xiaohui Bei, Fei Fang

Abstract: In recent years, traditional transportation platforms which mainly provide real-time ride-hailing services have started to accept rides scheduled in advance. The presence of both ride requests posted in real time and scheduled rides leads to new challenges to the service providers in deciding which requests to accept and how to dispatch the vehicles in a dynamic and optimal way, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been addressed by existing works. To fill the gap, we provide the following contributions: (i) a novel two-stage decision-making model where in the first stage, the system decides whether to accept requests scheduled in advance in an online fashion, and in the second stage, dispatches vehicles to on-demand ride requests in real time given the accepted scheduled requests as constraints; (ii) novel algorithms for both stages that take an estimated distribution of on-demand ride requests into account to handle both on-demand and scheduled requests.