50 research outputs found
Allocation Problems in Ride-Sharing Platforms: Online Matching with Offline Reusable Resources
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.Comment: To appear in AAAI 201