Order dispatch in price-aware ridesharing

Abstract

With the prevalence of car-hailing applications, ridesharing becomes more and more popular because of its great potential in monetary saving and environmental protection. Order dispatch is the key problem in ridesharing, which has a strong impact on riders' experience and platform's performance. Existing order dispatch research works fail to consider the price of the orders, which can be an important reference because it directly relates to the platform's profit. Our work takes the order price into concern, and formulates a constrained optimization problem, which takes platform's profit as the optimization objective and performs controls on riders' detour distance and waiting time. We prove the problem is NP-hard, thus, we propose approximation methods. We further develop a simulation framework based on real ridesharing order and vehicle data. We conduct experiments with this simulation framework to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.