Online Vehicle Dispatch: from Assignment to Scheduling

The available prior demand data will make it possible for the ride hailing platform to make the central control strategies, which plan a sequence of trips for drivers in a certain future time period, so that a system optimal vehicle dispatch could be achieved. However, handling a large scale booking requests within the restrictive computing time to achieve an optimal vehicle dispatch is a big challenge. This paper proposes an optimization framework for the online vehicle dispatch problem by adopting vehicle scheduling methodology. A novel approach is introduced to solve the optimization challenges of the large problem size and the limited computing time. The designed optimization framework is validated by the real-world demand data in Singapore.