Spatiotemporal applications such as taxi order dispatching and warehouse task scheduling depend critically on the algorithms for operational efficiency. However, the inherent dynamic nature of these applications presents challenges in algorithm design. The growth of mobility services has facilitated the collection of extensive spatiotemporal data, which in turn prompted algorithm designers to use data-driven methods. Reinforcement learning (RL), recognized for its strong performance and suitability for spatiotemporal contexts, has garnered considerable research interest. Despite their potential, RL algorithms necessitate the use of a simulator for both training and validation purposes. However, no specific simulation system has been developed for spatiotemporal algorithm design. This vacancy hinders the progress of spatiotemporal algorithm designers. In this demo, we build a system called Data-driven Spatiotemporal Simulator (DSS), hoping to bring convenience for spatiotemporal algorithm designers. DSS is adept at handling problems related to taxi order dispatching and warehouse task scheduling and possesses the versatility to be expanded for other user-defined scenarios. The system includes visualization modules that offer insightful panels, alongside developer tools designed to streamline the development process. This enables designers to efficiently craft, evaluate, and refine their algorithms, potentially accelerating innovation in spatiotemporal application development.

Ride hailing is a widespread shared mobility application where the central issue is to assign taxi requests to drivers with various objectives. Despite extensive research on task assignment in ride hailing, the fairness of earnings among drivers is largely neglected. Pioneer studies on fair task assignment in ride hailing are ineffective and inefficient due to their myopic optimization perspective and time-consuming assignment techniques. In this work, we propose LAF, an effective and efficient task assignment scheme that optimizes both utility and fairness. We adopt reinforcement learning to make assignments in a holistic manner and propose a set of acceleration techniques to enable fast fair assignment on large-scale data. Experiments show that LAF outperforms the state-of-the-arts by up to 86.7%, 29.1%, 797% on fairness, utility and efficiency, respectively.

Large ride-hailing platforms, such as DiDi, Uber and Lyft, connect tens of thousands of vehicles in a city to millions of ride demands throughout the day, providing great promises for improving transportation efficiency through the tasks of order dispatching and vehicle repositioning. Existing studies, however, usually consider the two tasks in simplified settings that hardly address the complex interactions between the two, the real-time fluctuations between supply and demand, and the necessary coordinations due to the large-scale nature of the problem. In this paper we propose a unified value-based dynamic learning framework (V1D3) for tackling both tasks. At the center of the framework is a globally shared value function that is updated continuously using online experiences generated from real-time platform transactions. To improve the sample-efficiency and the robustness, we further propose a novel periodic ensemble method combining the fast online learning with a large-scale offline training scheme that leverages the abundant historical driver trajectory data. This allows the proposed framework to adapt quickly to the highly dynamic environment, to generalize robustly to recurrent patterns and to drive implicit coordinations among the population of managed vehicles. Extensive experiments based on real-world datasets show considerably improvements over other recently proposed methods on both tasks. Particularly, V1D3 outperforms the first prize winners of both dispatching and repositioning tracks in the KDD Cup 2020 RL competition, achieving state-of-the-art results on improving both total driver income and user experience related metrics.