Title
Smart balancing of E-scooter sharing systems via deep reinforcement learning: a preliminary study
Abstract
Nowadays, micro-mobility sharing systems have become extremely popular. Such systems consist in fleets of dockless electric vehicles which are deployed in cities, and used by citizens to move in a more ecological and flexible way. Unfortunately, one of the issues related to such technologies is its intrinsic load imbalance, since users can pick up and drop off the electric vehicles where they prefer. In this paper we present ESB-DQN, a multi-agent system for E-Scooter Balancing (ESB) based on Deep Reinforcement Learning where agents are implemented as Deep Q-Networks (DQN). ESB-DQN offers suggestions to pick or return e-scooters in order to make the fleet usage and sharing as balanced as possible, still ensuring that the original plans of the user undergo only minor changes. The main contributions of this paper include a careful analysis of the state of the art, an innovative customer-oriented rebalancing strategy, the integration of state-of-the-art libraries for deep Reinforcement Learning into the existing ODySSEUS simulator of mobility sharing systems, and preliminary but promising experiments that suggest that our approach is worth further exploration.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.3233/IA-210126
INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Micro-mobility, dockless E-scooter sharing systems, smart balancing, multi-agent systems, deep reinforcement learning
Journal
16
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1724-8035
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gianvito Losapio100.34
Federico Minutoli200.34
Viviana Mascardi300.34
Angelo Ferrando400.34