Title
Combining value function approximation and multiple scenario approach for the effective management of ride-hailing services
Author
R.-Julius O. Heitmann
Technische Universität Braunschweig, Decision Support Group
Author
Marlin W. Ulmer
Otto von Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Chair of Management Science
... show all
Abstract
The availability of various services for individual mobility is increasing, especially in urban areas. Dynamic ride-hailing services address these aspects and are gaining market share with providers such as MOIA, UberX Share, Sprinti or BerlKönig. To be able to offer competitive pricing for such a service and at the same time provide a high service quality (e.g. fast response times), effective capacity management is needed. In order to reach this goal, two challenges have to be met by the service provider. On the one hand, a proper demand control has to be installed, which optimizes the responses to transportation requests from customers. On the other hand, suitable fleet control needs to be set in place to optimize the route of the fleet so that the demand can be met. Papers in the literature do solve both but typically focus on one of these two challenges. As an example, value function approximation (VFA) can be used to learn a service offering decision while anticipating future incoming requests. A typical example of a routing-focused method is the multiple scenario approach (MSA) creating a routing which anticipates future requests using a sampling method. In this paper, we combine VFA and MSA to address the two challenges in an effective way. The resulting method is called anticipatory-routing-and-service-offering (ARS). We find that the combined method significantly outperforms the individual components, improving not only the total reward but also the accepted requests. It is found that this performance is particularly high with a heavy workload and thus resources are relatively scarce. We analyse how and under which conditions the components together or individually are particularly important.
Keywords
Ride-sharingDial-a-rideDynamic vehicle routingValue function approximationMultiple scenario approach
Object type
Language
English [eng]
Persistent identifier
https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:2046053
Appeared in
Title
EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics
Volume
12
ISSN
2192-4376
Issued
2023
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Date issued
2023
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