Deep Demand Prediction: An Enhanced Conformer Model With Cold-Start Adaptation for Origin–Destination Ride-Hailing Demand Prediction

In intelligent transportation systems, one key challenge for managing ride-hailing services is the balancing of traffic supply and demand while meeting passenger needs within vehicle availability constraints. Accurate origin–destination (OD) demand predictions can empower platforms to execute timely reallocation of cruising vehicles and improve ride-sharing services. Nonetheless, the complexity of OD-based demand prediction arises from intricate spatiotemporal dependencies and a higher need for precision compared to zone-based predictions, which leads to many unprecedented OD pairs. To tackle this issue, we design a comprehensive set of 102 features, including travel demand, passenger count, travel volume, liveliness, weather, and cross features. We also introduce an enhanced conformer model, which is composed of a single conformer block that integrates feedforward layers, multihead self-attention mechanisms, and depth-wise separable convolution layers. To address the cold-start problem and manage large values, we design a specific algorithm for OD pairs lacking training data and apply a technique to handle larger values. Our approach demonstrates a marked improvement in prediction performance, with an 18% decrease in the total travel demand error and up to a 47% reduction for certain larger values in some cases. Through extensive experiments on a dataset collected from a city, provided by a ride-hailing platform, our proposed methods significantly outperform the most advanced models.