Matching Drivers to Riders: A Two-stage Robust Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Housni, Omar El, Goyal, Vineet, Hanguir, Oussama, Stein, Clifford
Format: Preprint
Published: 2020
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author Housni, Omar El
Goyal, Vineet
Hanguir, Oussama
Stein, Clifford
author_facet Housni, Omar El
Goyal, Vineet
Hanguir, Oussama
Stein, Clifford
contents Matching demand (riders) to supply (drivers) efficiently is a fundamental problem for ride-sharing platforms who need to match the riders (almost) as soon as the request arrives with only partial knowledge about future ride requests. A myopic approach that computes an optimal matching for current requests ignoring future uncertainty can be highly sub-optimal. In this paper, we consider a two-stage robust optimization framework for this matching problem where future demand uncertainty is modeled using a set of demand scenarios (specified explicitly or implicitly). The goal is to match the current request to drivers (in the first stage) so that the cost of first-stage matching and the worst-case cost over all scenarios for the second-stage matching is minimized. We show that the two-stage robust matching is NP-hard under various cost functions and present constant approximation algorithms for different settings of our two-stage problem. Furthermore, we test our algorithms on real-life taxi data from the city of Shenzhen and show that they substantially improve upon myopic solutions and reduce the maximum wait time of the second-stage riders.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2011_03624
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Matching Drivers to Riders: A Two-stage Robust Approach
Housni, Omar El
Goyal, Vineet
Hanguir, Oussama
Stein, Clifford
Optimization and Control
Matching demand (riders) to supply (drivers) efficiently is a fundamental problem for ride-sharing platforms who need to match the riders (almost) as soon as the request arrives with only partial knowledge about future ride requests. A myopic approach that computes an optimal matching for current requests ignoring future uncertainty can be highly sub-optimal. In this paper, we consider a two-stage robust optimization framework for this matching problem where future demand uncertainty is modeled using a set of demand scenarios (specified explicitly or implicitly). The goal is to match the current request to drivers (in the first stage) so that the cost of first-stage matching and the worst-case cost over all scenarios for the second-stage matching is minimized. We show that the two-stage robust matching is NP-hard under various cost functions and present constant approximation algorithms for different settings of our two-stage problem. Furthermore, we test our algorithms on real-life taxi data from the city of Shenzhen and show that they substantially improve upon myopic solutions and reduce the maximum wait time of the second-stage riders.
title Matching Drivers to Riders: A Two-stage Robust Approach
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03624