Čertický, Michal
Large-scale Online Ridesharing: The Effect of Assignment Optimality on System Performance
Fiedler, David, Čertický, Michal, Alonso-Mora, Javier, Pěchouček, Michal, Čáp, Michal
Mobility-on-demand (MoD) systems consist of a fleet of shared vehicles that can be hailed for one-way point-to-point trips. The total distance driven by the vehicles and the fleet size can be reduced by employing ridesharing, i.e., by assigning multiple passengers to one vehicle. However, finding the optimal passenger-vehicle assignment in an MoD system is a hard combinatorial problem. In this work, we demonstrate how the VGA method, a recently proposed systematic method for ridesharing, can be used to compute the optimal passenger-vehicle assignments and corresponding vehicle routes in a massive-scale MoD system. In contrast to existing works, we solve all passenger-vehicle assignment problems to optimality, regularly dealing with instances containing thousands of vehicles and passengers. Moreover, to examine the impact of using optimal ridesharing assignments, we compare the performance of an MoD system that uses optimal assignments against an MoD system that uses assignments computed using insertion heuristic and against an MoD system that uses no ridesharing. We found that the system that uses optimal ridesharing assignments subject to the maximum travel delay of 4 minutes reduces the vehicle distance driven by 57 % compared to an MoD system without ridesharing. Furthermore, we found that the optimal assignments result in a 20 % reduction in vehicle distance driven and 5 % lower average passenger travel delay compared to a system that uses insertion heuristic.
The Current State of StarCraft AI Competitions and Bots
Čertický, Michal (Czech Technical University in Prague) | Churchill, David (Memorial University of Newfoundland)
Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games have become an increasingly popular test-bed for modern artificial intelligence techniques. With this rise in popularity has come the creation of several annual competitions, in which AI agents (bots) play the full game of StarCraft: Broodwar by Blizzard Entertainment. The three major annual StarCraft AI Competitions are the Student StarCraft AI Tournament (SSCAIT), the Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) competition, and the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) competition. In this paper we will give an overview of the current state of these competitions, and the bots that compete in them.