Real-Time Driver-Request Assignment in Ridesourcing

Online on-demand ridesourcing service has played a huge role in transforming urban transportation. A central function in most on-demand ridesourcing platforms is to dynamically assign drivers to rider requests that could balance the request waiting times and the driver pick-up distances. To deal with the online nature of this problem, existing literature either divides the time horizon into short windows and applies a static offline assignment algorithm within each window or assumes a fully online setting that makes decisions for each request immediately upon its arrival. In this paper, we propose a more realistic model for the driver-request assignment that bridges the above two settings together. Our model allows the requests to wait after their arrival but assumes that they may leave at any time following a quitting function. Under this model, we design an efficient algorithm for assigning available drivers to requests in real-time. Our algorithm is able to incorporate future estimated driver arrivals into consideration and make strategic waiting and matching decisions that could balance the waiting time and pick-up distance of the assignment. We prove that our algorithm is optimal ex-ante in the single-request setting, and demonstrate its effectiveness in the general multi-request setting through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.