CD-Guide: A Dispatching and Charging Approach for Electric Taxicabs

Previous methods for passenger demand inference are unable to capture the effect of all possible random factors (e.g., accident and weather), hence resulting in insufficient accuracy. Moreover, due to the lack of charging optimization, existing taxicab dispatching methods cannot be applied to electric taxicabs directly. We propose CD-Guide, which provides Charging and Dispatching Guide for electric taxicabs based on customized selection and training of historical passenger demand data, multiobjective optimization, and reinforcement learning (RL). By analyzing a large-scale electric taxicab data set, we found that: 1) the histogram of passengers’ origin buildings is effective in illustrating the suitability of historical data for learning; 2) passenger demands in different regions vary a lot due to various random factors; and 3) charging time must be considered in dispatching electric taxicabs. We first develop a passenger demand inference model based on customized selection and training of suitable historical passenger demand data. Then, we develop two taxicab guidance methods that utilize multiobjective optimization and RL, respectively, to maximize the taxicab’s likelihood of finding passengers, maximally prevent the taxicab from missing passengers due to charging, and, meanwhile, maintain the continuous service of the taxicab. Extensive experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate that compared with the state of the art, CD-Guide increases the total number of served passengers by 100%, and the minimum State-of-Charge of all taxicabs by 75% during all time slots.