Real-time and Large-scale Fleet Allocation of Autonomous Taxis: A Case Study in New York Manhattan Island
This solves fleet allocation for autonomous taxi platforms to enhance efficiency and profitability, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like CMMDP and Column Generation.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently allocating autonomous taxis in real-time to address supply-demand imbalances and operational constraints, achieving improvements such as a 12.40% rise in income and 4.59% promotion in platform profit.
Nowadays, autonomous taxis become a highly promising transportation mode, which helps relieve traffic congestion and avoid road accidents. However, it hinders the wide implementation of this service that traditional models fail to efficiently allocate the available fleet to deal with the imbalance of supply (autonomous taxis) and demand (trips), the poor cooperation of taxis, hardly satisfied resource constraints, and on-line platform's requirements. To figure out such urgent problems from a global and more farsighted view, we employ a Constrained Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (CMMDP) to model fleet allocation decisions, which can be easily split into sub-problems formulated as a 'Dynamic assignment problem' combining both immediate rewards and future gains. We also leverage a Column Generation algorithm to guarantee the efficiency and optimality in a large scale. Through extensive experiments, the proposed approach not only achieves remarkable improvements over the state-of-the-art benchmarks in terms of the individual's efficiency (arriving at 12.40%, 6.54% rise of income and utilization, respectively) and the platform's profit (reaching 4.59% promotion) but also reveals a time-varying fleet adjustment policy to minimize the operation cost of the platform.