Title
An Integrated Reinforcement Learning and Centralized Programming Approach for Online Taxi Dispatching
Abstract
Balancing the supply and demand for ride-sourcing companies is a challenging issue, especially with real-time requests and stochastic traffic conditions of large-scale congested road networks. To tackle this challenge, this article proposes a robust and scalable approach that integrates reinforcement learning (RL) and a centralized programming (CP) structure to promote real-time taxi operations. Both real-time order matching decisions and vehicle relocation decisions at the microscopic network scale are integrated within a Markov decision process framework. The RL component learns the decomposed state-value function, which represents the taxi drivers’ experience, the off-line historical demand pattern, and the traffic network congestion. The CP component plans nonmyopic decisions for drivers collectively under the prescribed system constraints to explicitly realize cooperation. Furthermore, to circumvent sparse reward and sample imbalance problems over the microscopic road network, this article proposed a temporal-difference learning algorithm with prioritized gradient descent and adaptive exploration techniques. A simulator is built and trained with the Manhattan road network and New York City yellow taxi data to simulate the real-time vehicle dispatching environment. Both centralized and decentralized taxi dispatching policies are examined with the simulator. This case study shows that the proposed approach can further improve taxi drivers’ profits while reducing customers’ waiting times compared to several existing vehicle dispatching algorithms.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3060187
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Deep reinforcement learning (RL),multiagent system,online vehicle routing,stochastic network traffic,vehicle dispatching
Journal
33
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
2162-237X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
26
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Enming Liang100.34
Kexin Wen200.34
William H. K. Lam317420.40
Agachai Sumalee416213.12
R. X. Zhong5222.87