Heatmap-based Decision Support for Repositioning in Ride-Sharing Systems

Jarmo Haferkamp, Marlin Wolf Ulmer and Jan Fabian Ehmke

No 22003, FEMM Working Papers from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Faculty of Economics and Management

Abstract: In ride-sharing systems, platform providers aim to distribute the drivers in the city to meet current and potential future demand and to avoid service cancellations. Ensuring such distribution is particularly challenging in the case of a crowdsourced fleet, as drivers are not centrally controlled but are free to decide where to reposition when idle. Thus, providers look for alternative ways to ensure a vehicle distribution that benefits both users and drivers, and consequently the provider. We propose an intuitive means to improve idle ride-sharing vehicles' repositioning: repositioning opportunity heatmaps. These heatmaps highlight driver-specific earning opportunities approximated based on the expected future demand, fleet distribution, and location of the specific driver. Based on the heatmaps, drivers make decentralized yet better-informed repositioning decisions. As our heatmap policy changes the driver distribution, we propose an adaptive learning algorithm for designing our heatmaps in large-scale ride-sharing systems. We simulate the system and generate heatmaps based on previously learned repositioning opportunities in every iteration. We then update these based on the simulation's outcome and use the updated values in the next iteration. We test our heatmap design in a comprehensive case study on New York ride-sharing data. We show that carefully designed heatmaps reduce service cancellations therefore revenue loss for platform and drivers significantly.Length: 48 pages

Keywords: mobility-on-demand; vehicle repositioning; crowdsourced transportation; heatmap; stochastic dynamic decision making; adaptive learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.fww.ovgu.de/fww_media/femm/femm_2022/2022_03.pdf First version, 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mag:wpaper:22003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FEMM Working Papers from Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Faculty of Economics and Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by IT Administrators at FWW ().