CD-guide: A reinforcement learning based dispatching and charging approach for electric taxicabs

Previous passenger demand inference methods have insufficient accuracy because they fail to catch the influence of all random factors (e.g., weather, holiday). Also, existing taxicab dispatching methods are not directly applicable for electric taxicabs because they cannot optimize their charging. We present CD-Guide: an electric taxicab dispatching and charging approach based on customized training and Reinforcement Learning (RL). We studied a metropolitan-scale taxicab dataset, and found: histogram of passengers' origin buildings (i.e., where they come from) is useful for selecting suitable training data for inference model, passenger demand in different regions may be influenced by various unpredictable random factors, and taxicabs' charging time must be considered to avoid missing potential passengers. By saying suitable historical data, we mean the data that are under the influence of random factors similar as current time. Then, we develop a RL based method to guide a taxicab to maximize its probability of picking up a passenger, minimize the number of its missed passengers due to charging, and meanwhile avoid the taxicab from battery exhaustion. Our trace-driven experiments show that compared with previous methods, CD-Guide increases the total number of served passengers by 100%.