Allocation Problems in Ride-Sharing Platforms: Online Matching with Offline Reusable Resources
Abstract
Bipartite matching markets pair agents on one side of a market with agents, items, or contracts on the opposing side. Prior work addresses online bipartite matching markets, where agents arrive over time and are dynamically matched to a known set of disposable resources. In this paper, we propose a new model, Online Matching with (offline) Reusable Resources under Known Adversarial Distributions (OM-RR-KAD), in which resources on the offline side are reusable instead of disposable; that is, once matched, resources become available again at some point in the future. We show that our model is tractable by presenting an LP-based adaptive algorithm that achieves an online competitive ratio of 1/2 - eps for any given eps greater than 0. We also show that no non-adaptive algorithm can achieve a ratio of 1/2 + o(1) based on the same benchmark LP. Through a data-driven analysis on a massive openly-available dataset, we show our model is robust enough to capture the application of taxi dispatching services and ride-sharing systems. We also present heuristics that perform well in practice.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1711.08345,
title = {Allocation Problems in Ride-Sharing Platforms: Online Matching with Offline Reusable Resources},
author = {John P Dickerson and Karthik A Sankararaman and Aravind Srinivasan and Pan Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.08345},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
To appear in AAAI 2018