Ralph L. Disney Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan
Xiuli Chao is the Ralph L. Disney Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests include queueing, scheduling, inventory control, game theory, supply chain management, and online learning and optimization. He is the co-author of two books, “Operations Scheduling with Applications in Manufacturing and Services” (Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1998), and “Queueing Networks: Customers, Signals, and Product Form Solutions” (John Wiley & Sons, 1999). Chao received the Erlang Prize from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS in 1998, and the David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award from Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) in 2005. He also received the Jon and Beverly Holt Award for Excellence in Teaching from the University of Michigan. Chao is a co-developer of scheduling system Lekin. He is a fellow of INFORMS and IISE.
Date: |
Friday, 14 February 2025 |
Time: |
10:00 am - 11:30 am |
Venue: |
Hon Sui Sen Memorial Library Auditorium 1 Hon Sui Sen Drive Singapore 117588 (Map) |
With the development of shared mobility (e.g., ride-sourcing systems such as Uber, Lyft and Didi), there has been a growing interest in pricing and empty vehicle relocation to maximize system performance. Although customers exhibit patience during their waiting for available driver, it has been neglected in most studies due to the complexities it introduces. In this work, we develop a provably near-optimal dynamic pricing and empty vehicle relocation mechanism for a ride-sourcing system with limited customer patience. We model the ride-sourcing system as a network of double-ended queues. To derive a near-optimal control policy, we first establish a fluid limit for the network in a large market regime and show that the fluid-based optimal solution provides an upper bound of the performance of the original ride-sourcing system for all dynamic policies. Then, we develop a simple dynamic policy for the original problem based on the fluid solution and show that its performance almost matches the upper bound. Among our results, we answer two open questions raised in the literature: (i) the performance of our policy converges to that of the true optimal value exponentially fast in time when the market size is large; (ii) the customer loss of our proposed policy decreases to zero exponentially fast when market size increases. This talk is based on joint work with M. Abdolmaleki, T. Radvand, and Y. Yin at the University of Michigan.