Joint Order Dispatch and Charging for Electric Self-Driving Taxi Systems

Nowadays, the rapid development of self-driving technology and its fusion with the current vehicle electrification process has given rise to electric self-driving taxis (es-taxis). Foreseeably, es-taxis will become a major force that serves the massive urban mobility demands not far into the future. Though promising, it is still a fundamental unsolved problem of effectively deciding when and where a city-scale fleet of es-taxis should be charged, so that enough es-taxis will be available whenever and wherever ride requests are submitted. Furthermore, charging decisions are far from isolated, but tightly coupled with the order dispatch process that matches orders with es-taxis. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the problem of joint order dispatch and charging in es-taxi systems, with the objective of maximizing the ride-hailing platform’s long-term cumulative profit. Technically, such problem is challenging in a myriad of aspects, such as long-term profit maximization, partial statistical information on future orders, etc. We address the various arising challenges by meticulously integrating a series of methods, including distributionally robust optimization, primal-dual transformation, and second order conic programming to yield far-sighted decisions. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods though extensive experiments based on two large-scale real-world online ride-hailing order datasets.