PassGoodPool: Joint Passengers and Goods Fleet Management With Reinforcement Learning Aided Pricing, Matching, and Route Planning

Abstract

In this paper, we present a dynamic, demand aware, and pricing-based matching and route planning framework that allows efficient pooling of multiple passengers and goods in each vehicle. This approach includes the flexibility for transferring goods through multiple hops from source to destination as well as pooling of passengers. The key components of the proposed approach include (i) Pricing by the vehicles to passengers which is based on the insertion cost, which determines the matching based on passenger's acceptance/rejection, (ii) Matching of goods to vehicles, and the multi-hop routing of goods, (iii) Route planning of the vehicles to pick. up and drop passengers and goods, (i) Dispatching idle vehicles to areas of anticipated high passenger and goods demand using Deep Reinforcement Learning, and (v) Allowing for distributed inference at each vehicle while collectively optimizing fleet objectives. Our proposed framework can be deployed independently within each vehicle as this minimizes computational costs associated with the gorwth of distributed systems and democratizes decision-making to each individual. The proposed framework is validated in a simulated environment, where we leverage realistic delivery datasets such as the New York City Taxi public dataset and Google Maps traffic data from delivery offering businesses.Simulations on a variety of vehicle types, goods, and passenger utility functions show the effectiveness of our approach as compared to baselines that do not consider combined load transportation or dynamic multi-hop route planning. Our proposed method showed improvements over the next best baseline in various aspects including a 15% increase in fleet utilization and 20% increase in average vehicle profits.