A prediction-based iterative Kuhn-Munkres approach for service vehicle reallocation in ride-hailing

Online ride-hailing services provide additional transportation capability by recruiting private vehicles to meet people's growing travel demand. To ensure the profitability of drivers and platforms, pick-up efficiency and frequency must be maintained at high levels. Therefore, consistency between the spatial distribution of drivers and that of travel demand becomes a key issue to address. This paper proposes a prediction-based iterative Kuhn-Munkres approach for service vehicle reallocation in the context of large-scale online ride-hailing. Firstly, preliminaries are formally defined and a novel mathematical model for the problem is proposed. Secondly, a deep spatio-temporal residual perception network is designed to accurately predict travel demand. Thirdly, an iterative Kuhn-Munkres approach combined with an improved A-Star algorithm is developed to reallocate service vehicles to spatial locations according to their distinct travel demand densities. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate and verify the performance of the proposed approach.