Pioneering companies such as Waymo have deployed robo-taxi services in several U.S. cities. These robo-taxis are electric vehicles, and their operations require the joint optimization of ride matching, vehicle repositioning, and charging scheduling in a stochastic environment. We model the operations of the ride-hailing system with robo-taxis as a discrete-time, average reward Markov Decision Process with infinite horizon. As the fleet size grows, the dispatching is challenging as the set of system state and the fleet dispatching action set grow exponentially with the number of vehicles. To address this, we introduce a scalable deep reinforcement learning algorithm, called Atomic Proximal Policy Optimization (Atomic-PPO), that reduces the action space using atomic action decomposition. We evaluate our algorithm using real-world NYC for-hire vehicle data and we measure the performance using the long-run average reward achieved by the dispatching policy relative to a fluid-based reward upper bound. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our Atomic-PPO compared to benchmarks. Furthermore, we conduct extensive numerical experiments to analyze the efficient allocation of charging facilities and assess the impact of vehicle range and charger speed on fleet performance.

Optimizing service schedules is pivotal to the reliable, efficient, and inclusive on-demand mobility. This pressing challenge is further exacerbated by the increasing needs of an aging population, the over-subscription of existing services, and the lack of effective solution methods. This study addresses the intricacies of service scheduling, by jointly optimizing rider trip planning and crew scheduling for a complex dynamic mobility service. The resulting optimization problems are extremely challenging computationally for state-of-the-art methods. To address this fundamental gap, this paper introduces the Joint Rider Trip Planning and Crew Shift Scheduling Problem (JRTPCSSP) and a novel solution method, called AGGNNI-CG (Attention and Gated GNN- Informed Column Generation), that hybridizes column generation and machine learning to obtain near-optimal solutions to the JRTPCSSP with the real-time constraints of the application. The key idea of the machine-learning component is to dramatically reduce the number of paths to explore in the pricing component, accelerating the most time-consuming component of the column generation. The machine learning component is a graph neural network with an attention mechanism and a gated architecture, that is particularly suited to cater for the different input sizes coming from daily operations. AGGNNI-CG has been applied to a challenging, real-world dataset from the Paratransit system of Chatham County in Georgia. It produces dramatic improvements compared to the baseline column generation approach, which typically cannot produce feasible solutions in reasonable time on both medium-sized and large-scale complex instances. AGGNNI-CG also produces significant improvements in service compared to the existing system.

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers a solution to current traffic congestion by providing on-demand air mobility in urban areas. Effective traffic management is crucial for efficient operation of UAM systems, especially for high-demand scenarios. In this paper, we present VertiSync, a centralized traffic management policy for on-demand UAM networks. VertiSync schedules the aircraft for either servicing trip requests or rebalancing in the network subject to aircraft safety margins and separation requirements during takeoff and landing. We characterize the system-level throughput of VertiSync, which determines the demand threshold at which travel times transition from being stabilized to being increasing over time. We show that the proposed policy is able to maximize the throughput for sufficiently large fleet sizes. We demonstrate the performance of VertiSync through a case study for the city of Los Angeles. We show that VertiSync significantly reduces travel times compared to a first-come first-serve scheduling policy.

This work considers the scheduling problem for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles travelling between origin-destination pairs with both hard and soft trip deadlines. Each route is described by a discrete probability distribution over trip completion times (or delay) and over inter-arrival times of requests (or demand) for the route along with a fixed hard or soft deadline. Soft deadlines carry a cost that is incurred when the deadline is missed. An online, safe scheduler is developed that ensures that hard deadlines are never missed, and that average cost of missing soft deadlines is minimized. The system is modelled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and safe model-based learning is used to find the probabilistic distributions over route delays and demand. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) Earliest Deadline First (EDF) is used to safely explore the learned models in an online fashion and develop a near-optimal non-preemptive scheduling policy. These results are compared with Value Iteration (VI) and MCTS (Random) scheduling solutions.

In this paper, we study a challenging problem of how to pool multiple ride-share trip requests in real time under an uncertain environment. The goals are better performance metrics of efficiency and acceptable satisfaction of riders. To solve the problem effectively, an objective function that compromises the benefits and losses of dynamic ridesharing service is proposed. The Polar Coordinates based Ride-Matching strategy (PCRM) that can adapt to the satisfaction of riders on board is also addressed. In the experiment, large scale data sets from New York City (NYC) are applied. We do a case study to identify the best set of parameters of the dynamic ridesharing service with a training set of 135,252 trip requests. In addition, we also use a testing set containing 427,799 trip requests and two state-of-the-art approaches as baselines to estimate the effectiveness of our method. The experimental results show that on average 38% of traveling distance can be saved, nearly 100% of passengers can be served and each rider only spends an additional 3.8 minutes in ridesharing trips compared to single rider service.

We are living in an era where artificial intelligence (A.I.) will play a significant role in our path forward. Entrepreneur Elon Musk warns that A.I. robots should not be turned into war machines. While Russian president Vladimir Putin recently said the nation that leads in A.I. will be "the ruler of the world." So where does that leave us when it comes to working with robots in the business world? As it turns out A.I. and bots and machine learning are the buzz words of the industry and it would be safe to say pretty much every startup going forward will leverage A.I. or machine learning to build their products of the future.

Artificial intelligence software and robots are powerful in pattern recognition, predictive analytics, heavy computations, and handling repetitive tasks. Thanks to these capabilities, machines are gradually replacing humans in many occupations and activities, to extent of a growing concern about the impact of automation on the job market. While the power of AI is indisputable, the question arises how far will automation go and what will be its impact on employees, organizations, and business processes. The main question is -- will AI become the next boss for the majority of employees? Most experts agree that the majority of occupations will be partly or fully automated in the near future. In practice, this means that employees will be either fully replaced by machines, or begin working with them as assistants, trainers, or subordinates.