Data-Driven Pick-Up Location Recommendation for Ride-Hailing Services

Ride-hailing service (RHS) has become an important transportation mode in our daily life. Although many works have been proposed to improve RHS from different aspects, only few works focus on the selections of pick-up locations, where rider and driver meet and start a trip. In this paper, we present
MPLRec
, a data-driven pick-up location recommendation system that exploits riders’ specific mobility demands, e.g., destination, and historical experiences to meet riders’ travel requirements.
MPLRec
generates potential pick-up locations over the road network and characterizes them with rich features that describe a location from the riders’ perspective. We also build spatio-temporal indexes to organize potential pick-up locations and historical data for facilitating online recommending. When processing an online recommendation request,
MPLRec
derives candidate pick-up locations and investigates them with materialized features, which are computed from historical order and trajectory data while considering rider's mobility demands. Based on these features, a novel scoring function is used to derive the best pick-up location for each request. Moreover, we implement an RHS simulator to evaluate
MPLRec
using large-scale practical ride-hailing datasets. Extensive experiments and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of
MPLRec
, which can complete each request within 0.5 s and largely reduce the ride-hailing costs when compared to baseline methods.