AAAI 2024technical6 citations

NondBREM: Nondeterministic Offline Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Order Dispatching

Hongbo Zhang, Guang Wang, Xu Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Chen Zhang, Zheng Dong, Yang Wang

Abstract

One of the most important tasks in ride-hailing is order dispatching, i.e., assigning unserved orders to available drivers. Recent order dispatching has achieved a significant improvement due to the advance of reinforcement learning, which has been approved to be able to effectively address sequential decision-making problems like order dispatching. However, most existing reinforcement learning methods require agents to learn the optimal policy by interacting with environments online, which is challenging or impractical for real-world deployment due to high costs or safety concerns. For example, due to the spatiotemporally unbalanced supply and demand, online reinforcement learning-based order dispatching may significantly impact the revenue of the ride-hailing platform and passenger experience during the policy learning period. Hence, in this work, we develop an offline deep reinforcement learning framework called NondBREM for large-scale order dispatching, which learns policy from only the accumulated logged data to avoid costly and unsafe interactions with the environment. In NondBREM, a Nondeterministic Batch-Constrained Q-learning (NondBCQ) module is developed to reduce the algorithm extrapolation error and a Random Ensemble Mixture (REM) module that integrates multiple value networks with multi-head networks is utilized to improve the model generalization and robustness. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world ride-hailing datasets show the superiority of our design.

BibTeX
@article{Zhang_Wang_Wang_Zhou_Zhang_Dong_Wang_2024, title={NondBREM: Nondeterministic Offline Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Order Dispatching}, volume={38}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/27794}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v38i1.27794}, abstractNote={One of the most important tasks in ride-hailing is order dispatching, i.e., assigning unserved orders to available drivers. Recent order dispatching has achieved a significant improvement due to the advance of reinforcement learning, which has been approved to be able to effectively address sequential decision-making problems like order dispatching. However, most existing reinforcement learning methods require agents to learn the optimal policy by interacting with environments online, which is challenging or impractical for real-world deployment due to high costs or safety concerns. For example, due to the spatiotemporally unbalanced supply and demand, online reinforcement learning-based order dispatching may significantly impact the revenue of the ride-hailing platform and passenger experience during the policy learning period. Hence, in this work, we develop an offline deep reinforcement learning framework called NondBREM for large-scale order dispatching, which learns policy from only the accumulated logged data to avoid costly and unsafe interactions with the environment. In NondBREM, a Nondeterministic Batch-Constrained Q-learning (NondBCQ) module is developed to reduce the algorithm extrapolation error and a Random Ensemble Mixture (REM) module that integrates multiple value networks with multi-head networks is utilized to improve the model generalization and robustness. Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world ride-hailing datasets show the superiority of our design.}, number={1}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Zhang, Hongbo and Wang, Guang and Wang, Xu and Zhou, Zhengyang and Zhang, Chen and Dong, Zheng and Wang, Yang}, year={2024}, month={Mar.}, pages={401-409} }