Prize Winning Paper Titled: Ride-hailing, Order Dispatching on DiDi via Reinforcement Learning

A team including Lehigh’s Industrial & Systems Engineering Ph.D Alum Xiaocheng Tang ‘15 was awarded the 2019 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations. This prize recognizes the quality and coherence of the analysis used in practice.

Their prize-winning paper, “Ride-hailing, Order Dispatching on DiDi via Reinforcement Learning,” was a response to address the problems facing the increased supply and demand of the current dispatch system; a real-time software platform that automates scheduling and routing of vehicles using location and traffic data to connect drivers with riders via their mobile phones.

The researchers studied data from the ride-hailing platform DiDi, one of the world’s leading mobile transportation platforms. Their work cites distinct applications of analytics and O.R. to increase efficiency of these services and accomplish multiple goals.

The prize-winning team included Zhiwei Qin and Yan Jiao of DiDi Research America and Fan Zhang, Zhe Xu, Hongtu Zhu, and Jieping Ye of Didi Chuxing Technology Corp. This team will receive a monetary award of $1,000.