Automated Order Dispatching Strategies Design Using Genetic Programming for Dynamic Ridesharing Problem

Ridesharing is a popular transportation mode and has become an important part of smart city development, which helps alleviate the pressure of urban travel. The ridesharing problem (RSP) is mainly to match drivers to suitable passengers. In practice, passengers appear dynamically, and the departure and the destination locations of these subsequent orders are unknown, resulting in the dynamic RSP (DRSP). To solve this dynamic optimization problem, this paper develops a new genetic programming hyperheuristic (GPHH) method to evolve order dispatching rules (ODRs), which can guide drivers to match suitable passengers in real time. The proposed GPHH method contains a heuristic template for simulation-based hyper-heuristic optimization. The experiment results show that the proposed GPHH method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis revealed some valuable insights, such as the generalizability of the generated rules and the impact of some features on the results.