HCRide: Harmonizing Passenger Fairness and Driver Preference for Human-Centered Ride-Hailing
This addresses a human-centered optimization problem for ride-hailing services, focusing on improving experience for both passengers and drivers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of balancing passenger fairness and driver preference in ride-hailing dispatch systems without compromising efficiency, achieving improvements of 2.02% in efficiency, 5.39% in fairness, and 10.21% in driver preference over state-of-the-art baselines.
Order dispatch systems play a vital role in ride-hailing services, which directly influence operator revenue, driver profit, and passenger experience. Most existing work focuses on improving system efficiency in terms of operator revenue, which may cause a bad experience for both passengers and drivers. Hence, in this work, we aim to design a human-centered ride-hailing system by considering both passenger fairness and driver preference without compromising the overall system efficiency. However, it is nontrivial to achieve this target due to the potential conflicts between passenger fairness and driver preference since optimizing one may sacrifice the other. To address this challenge, we design HCRide, a Human-Centered Ride-hailing system based on a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm called Harmonization-oriented Actor-Bi-Critic (Habic), which includes three major components (i.e., a multi-agent competition mechanism, a dynamic Actor network, and a Bi-Critic network) to optimize system efficiency and passenger fairness with driver preference consideration. We extensively evaluate our HCRide using two real-world ride-hailing datasets from Shenzhen and New York City. Experimental results show our HCRide effectively improves system efficiency by 2.02%, fairness by 5.39%, and driver preference by 10.21% compared to state-of-the-art baselines.