Efficient proactive vehicle relocation for on-demand mobility service with recurrent neural networks

Abstract One major challenge for on-demand mobility service (OMS) providers is to seamlessly match empty vehicles with trip requests so that the total vacant mileage is minimized. In this study, we develop an innovative data-driven approach for devising efficient vehicle relocation policy for OMS that (1) proactively relocates vehicles before the demand is observed and (2) reduces the inequality among drivers’ income so that the proactive relocation policy is fair and is likely to be followed by drivers. Our approach represents the fusion of optimization and machine learning methods, which comprises three steps: First, we formulate the optimal proactive relocation as an optimal/stable matching problems and solve for global optimal solutions based on historical data. Second, the optimal solutions are then grouped and fed to train the deep learning models which consist of fully connected layers and long short-term memory networks. Low rank approximation is introduced to reduce the model complexity and improve the training performances. Finally, we use the trained model to predict the relocation policy which can be implemented in real time. We conduct comprehensive numerical experiments and sensitivity analyses to demonstrate the performances of the proposed method using New York City taxi data. The results suggest that our method will reduce empty mileage per trip by 54–70% under the optimal matching strategy, and a 25–32% reduction can also be achieved by following the stable matching strategy. We also validate that the predicted relocation policies are robust in the presence of uncertain passenger demand level and passenger trip-requesting behavior.