Operating Electric Vehicle Fleet for Ride-Hailing Services With Reinforcement Learning

Providing ride-hailing services with electric vehicles can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and solve the last mile problem. This paper develops a reinforcement learning based algorithm to operate a community owned electric vehicle fleet, which provides ride-hailing services to local residents. The goals of operating the electric vehicle fleet are to minimize customer waiting time, electricity cost, and operational costs of the vehicles. A novel framework characterized by decentralized learning and centralized decision making is proposed to solve the electric vehicle fleet dispatch problem. The decentralized learning process allows the individual vehicles to share their operating experiences and deep neural network model for state-value function estimation, which mitigates the curse of dimensionality of state and action domains. The centralized decision making framework converts the vehicle fleet coordination problem into a linear assignment problem, which has polynomial time complexity. Numerical study results show that the proposed approach outperforms the benchmark algorithms in terms of societal cost reduction.