Optimize taxi driving strategies based on reinforcement learning

ABSTRACTThe efficiency of taxi services in big cities influences not only the convenience of peoples’ travel but also urban traffic and profits for taxi drivers. To balance the demands and supplies of taxicabs, spatio-temporal knowledge mined from historical trajectories is recommended for both passengers finding an available taxicab and cabdrivers estimating the location of the next passenger. However, taxi trajectories are long sequences where single-step optimization cannot guarantee the global optimum. Taking long-term revenue as the goal, a novel method is proposed based on reinforcement learning to optimize taxi driving strategies for global profit maximization. This optimization problem is formulated as a Markov decision process for the whole taxi driving sequence. The state set in this model is defined as the taxi location and operation status. The action set includes the operation choices of empty driving, carrying passengers or waiting, and the subsequent driving behaviors. The reward, as the ob...