Regime-Calibrated Demand Priors for Ride-Hailing Fleet Dispatch and Repositioning
This work addresses the problem of demand prediction for ride-hailing fleet dispatch, offering a training-free, explainable approach that achieves substantial wait-time reductions across diverse scenarios and cities.
The paper introduces a regime-calibrated demand prior for ride-hailing dispatch that segments historical trip data into demand regimes and matches the current operating period to similar historical analogues. On 5.2 million NYC trips, the method reduces mean rider wait times by 31.1% and P95 wait by 37.6%, and generalizes to Chicago with a 23.3% wait reduction without retraining.
Effective ride-hailing dispatch requires anticipating demand patterns that vary substantially across time-of-day, day-of-week, season, and special events. We propose a regime-calibrated approach that (i) segments historical trip data into demand regimes, (ii) matches the current operating period to the most similar historical analogues via a similarity ensemble combining Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance, Wasserstein-1 distance, feature distance, variance ratio, event pattern similarity, and temporal proximity, and (iii) uses the resulting calibrated demand prior to drive both an LP-based fleet repositioning policy and batch dispatch with Hungarian matching. In ablation, a distributional-only metric subset achieves the strongest mean-wait reduction, while the full ensemble is retained as a robustness-oriented default that preserves calendar and event context. Evaluated on 5.2 million NYC TLC trips across 8 diverse scenarios (winter/summer, weekday/weekend/holiday, morning/evening/night) with 5 random seeds each, our method reduces mean rider wait times by 31.1% (bootstrap 95% CI: [26.5, 36.6]; Friedman chi-squared = 80.0, p = 4.25e-18; Cohen's d = 7.5-29.9). P95 wait drops 37.6% and the Gini coefficient of wait times improves from 0.441 to 0.409. The two contributions compose multiplicatively: calibration provides 16.9% reduction relative to the replay baseline; LP repositioning adds a further 15.5%. The approach requires no training, is deterministic and explainable, generalizes to Chicago (23.3% wait reduction using the NYC-built regime library without retraining), and is robust across fleet sizes (32-47% improvement for 0.5x-2.0x fleet scaling). Code is available at https://github.com/IndarKarhana/regime-calibrated-dispatch.