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Publication

A Comparison of Repositioning and Scheduling Algorithms for the Ride-Hailing Problem

Lauren Paul; Sebastian Hübner; Christina Plump; Bernhard J. Berger; Rolf Drechsler
In: 49th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence. German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-2026), August 11-14, Bremen, Germany, 2026.

Abstract

The Ride-Hailing Problem is an online optimization challenge that coordinates a fleet of vehicles to serve requests revealed over time. The problem is NP-hard, and many solution approaches use stochastic or machine-learning based algorithms, which perform well but are difficult to interpret. We study the trade-offs between performance and explainability. Our results show that greedy assignment consistently outperforms more complex methods, indicating that explainability need not come at the cost of efficiency. We also find that the effectiveness of repositioning strategies strongly depends on demand patterns, highlighting the value of context-aware policies.