Ride-hailing platforms have been facing the challenge of balancing demand and supply. Existing vehicle reposition techniques often treat drivers as homogeneous agents and relocate them deterministically, assuming compliance with the reposition. In this paper, we consider a more realistic and driver-centric scenario where drivers have unique cruising preferences and can decide whether to take the recommendation or not on their own. We propose i-Rebalance, a personalized vehicle reposition technique with deep reinforcement learning (DRL). i-Rebalance estimates drivers' decisions on accepting reposition recommendations through an on-field user study involving 99 real drivers. To optimize supply-demand balance and enhance preference satisfaction simultaneously, i-Rebalance has a sequential reposition strategy with dual DRL agents: Grid Agent to determine the reposition order of idle vehicles, and Vehicle Agent to provide personalized recommendations to each vehicle in the pre-defined order. This sequential learning strategy facilitates more effective policy training within a smaller action space compared to traditional joint-action methods. Evaluation of real-world trajectory data shows that i-Rebalance improves driver acceptance rate by 38.07% and total driver income by 9.97%.

According to a report by Venture Beat, now may be the time to pull the trigger on that GPU purchase you have been holding off on. With cryptocurrency on the decline and the mining industry pulling back its expenditures on GPUs, you could spend less on a graphics card than ever before. The market is prime for users to finally get their hands on a GPU as the supply-demand issues it has been experiencing are coming to an end. With less pent-up demand for the technology, balance may potentially (finally) be restored, and it may be a little easier to swallow the price, as well as find more GPUs in stock. Below, seven members of Forbes Technology Council discuss whether the supply-demand issues with GPUs will finally find some sort of balance based on falling GPU prices.