Network-Flow-Based Efficient Vehicle Dispatch for City-Scale Ride-Hailing Systems

Ride-hailing systems (RHSs) provide passengers with convenient and flexible mobility services, have played an important role in modern urban transportation. With the limited vehicles, RHSs wish to optimize the dispatch of vehicles to requests with the objective of serving as many requests as possible. To address such a city-scale vehicle dispatch problem with thousands of vehicles and requests in each epoch, existing algorithms always take a tradeoff between effectiveness (i.e., real-time) and efficiency (i.e., service rate), such as ignoring future demands to guarantee real-time or solving a complex combinatorial optimization to improve service rate. To guarantee the service rate in a real-time fashion, this paper proposes two novel network flow-based vehicle dispatch algorithms. A network flow-based algorithm (NFBA) is provided to deal with offline scenarios. By constructing the vehicle-shareability network, a min-cost flow is built to find the optimal dispatch of vehicles to requests. To improve the request service rate in real-time, an efficient multi-sample multi-network flow-based algorithm (MNFBA) is proposed for the online scenarios. Each min-cost flow is utilized for a sample of future requests, and online vehicle dispatch policy is averaged over these flows. Extensive simulations based on real-world trip datasets in New York City are conducted. The experimental results show that compared to the benchmarks, our proposed algorithm can generate the dispatch of vehicles to requests within seconds, but can greatly increase the daily request service rate.