process the requests, that the so lution was not appli-
cable for rea l-time usag e. We identified th at the cause
of this problem was the former vehicle sorting stage,
which inefficiently considered false p ositive vehicles
as fitting and therefore the second stage, the schedu-
ler, had to do many schedule adjustments of unfitting
vehicles.
The pro posed optimization replaces the vehicle
sorting stage and tries to avoid time constraint vio-
lations. At first, we determine the pockets (i. e. po-
tential placements) of the pick-up and drop-off events
of a new request within a schedule and use the infor-
mation gathered from n eighboring events for a mo re
precise ju dgment. Based on this, we calculate thre e
measures (detour distance, largest pocket and reward)
and derive the final fitness score by the weighted li-
near combination of these three measures. Moreover,
we introduc e a feedback loop into the processing pi-
peline for the system to learn from its successes and
failures in order to regulate the measure weights ac-
cordingly. For the evaluation, we extract trip reque-
sts from New York City taxi trip data and run two
simulations, i. e., we let the old and new implementa-
tions with otherwise identical configurations process
the same re quests. The evaluation results are categori-
zed in three groups: Performance improvement, cus-
tomer satisfaction and serv ic e costs. As the main goal
of this work, the new implementation outperforms the
old one in all simulation s. Moreover, the new imple-
mentation provides better customer satisfaction in al-
most all simulations. Since the new implementatio n
aims to minimize the possibility of tim e constraint
violations, it distributes requests more evenly to all
vehicles. With generou s configurations (e. g. there
are more vehicles in service than actually needed), it
has slightly higher vehicle costs. When reducin g the
number of vehicles, the new implementation starts to
yield better results in all aspec ts. We observe that a
time wind ow of 10 min and 2000 vehicles each with a
capacity of 10 can satisfy 98% of the demand at peak
periods. At off-peak time perio ds, the n umber of vehi-
cles can be reduced to 500 to accomplish the same.
This work serves as a basis for fu rther experimen-
tation and improvements. Having a fast evaluation
cycle enables extensive testing with big problem in-
stances to better assess the real-world applicability.
Event tho ugh the performance gain is particularly evi-
dent with the data set high density, the test runtime is
still suboptimal with some c onfigurations. Further-
more, the disadvantageou s consequences of generou s
configurations (making use of all vehicles, decre a sed
shared rides and capacity utilization) should be avoi-
ded. Addressing these issues is part of future work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was partially fun ded by the Ger man Fe-
deral Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure
(BMVI) for the project “Dig italisierte Mobilit¨at – die
Offene Mobilit¨atsplattform” (19E16007B).
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