Abstract: We propose a general framework to study the on-demand shared ride-sourcing transportation systems, and focus on the multi-objective matching between demand and supply. The platforms match passengers and drivers in real time without observing future information, considering multiple objectives such as pick-up time, platform revenue, and service quality. We develop an efficient online matching policy that adaptively balances the trade-offs between multiple objectives in a dynamic setting and provide theoretical performance guarantees for the policy. We prove that the proposed adaptive matching policy can achieve the solution that minimizes the Euclidean distance to any pre-determined multi-objective target. Through numerical experiments and industrial testing using real data from a ride-sourcing platform, we demonstrate that our approach is able to obtain a delicate balance between multiple objectives and bring value to all the stakeholders in the ride-sourcing ecosystem. We also explore an advanced policy addressing ride-matching problems under non-stationary decision scenarios.

Bio: Dr. Wang is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a bachelor degree from Tsinghua University, dual Master’s degrees in operations research and transportation from MIT, and a doctoral degree in operations research from MIT. Dr. Wang is also an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. His research has focused on methodologies on operations research, analytics and optimization, data-driven modeling and machine learning algorithms, and the applications in smart cities and urban systems, including innovative transportation, advanced logistics, and intelligent healthcare systems. He has papers published in leading journals such as Transportation Science, American Economic Review Papers & Proceedings, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Transportation Research Part B: Methodological.  Dr. Wang serves as the guest-editor for the Special Issue on Innovative Shared Transportation in Transportation Research Part B, as a reviewer for over 25 different academic journals, and named as Chan Wui & Yunyin Rising Star Fellow in Transportation. Dr. Wang was nominated for MIT’s top teaching award for graduate students, the Goodwin Medal, and won the excellent teaching award for junior faculty at Singapore Management University. During his Ph.D. at MIT, he also served as the co-President of MIT Chinese Students & Scholars Association and Chair of MIT-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum.