Date: Monday, May 30th 2022, 10h00
Place: Inria Lille-Nord Europe
Optimizing Pricing, Repositioning, Pickup Time, and Idle Time in Ride-Hailing Systems
Abstract:
In ride-hailing systems, pickup time refers to the time that elapses from the moment a vehicle is dispatched to pick up a rider until the rider is picked up.
A fundamental phenomenon in ride-hailing systems is that there is a trade-off between pickup time and the time that a vehicle waits for a dispatch.
If vehicles spend little time idle waiting for a dispatch, then few vehicles are available when a rider makes a request, and thus the mean distance between a rider and the closest available vehicle is long, which means that pickup time is long.
This phenomenon is of great importance in ride-hailing.
In spite of this, the existing literature on price optimization for ride-hailing, and on repositioning optimization for ride-hailing, ignores pickup time.
We developed a way to formulate a simultaneous price and repositioning optimization problem, that takes this dependence of the distribution of pickup time on the number of idle vehicles into account, as a tractable conic optimization problem.
We show how the optimal solution can be used to construct policies that perform much better in simulations than the policies proposed in previous papers.
