Learning-Based Online Optimization for Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Fleet Control

Autonomous mobility-on-demand systems are a viable alternative to mitigate many transportation-related externalities in cities, such as rising vehicle volumes in urban areas and transportation-related pollution. However, the success of these systems heavily depends on efficient and effective fleet control strategies. In this context, we study online control algorithms for autonomous mobility-on-demand systems and develop a novel hybrid combinatorial optimization-enriched machine learning pipeline which learns online dispatching and rebalancing policies from optimal full-information solutions. We test our hybrid pipeline on large-scale real-world scenarios with different vehicle fleet sizes and various request densities. We show that our pipeline outperforms greedy and model-predictive control approaches with respect to various key performance indicators (KPIs), for example, by up to 17.1% and on average by 6.3% in terms of realized profit, and on average by 4.7% in terms of satisfied customers.

History: Accepted by Andrea Lodi, Area Editor for Design & Analysis of Algorithms–Discrete.

Funding: This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant 449261765].

Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information (https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2024.0637) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository (https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2024.0637). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/.