Regime-Calibrated Fleet Repositioning with a Spatial Queue-Regret Decomposition
Abstract
Ride-hailing and autonomous mobility-on-demand operators reposition idle supply before future demand is fully observed. We study a retrieval-calibrated predict-then-optimize approach for this problem: historical demand regimes are matched to the current query block, combined into a calibrated demand prior, and passed to a fleet-balancing controller. The paper makes three contributions. First, we train a leakage-safe similarity gate whose objective penalizes demand error, pickup spatial mismatch, and queue shortage risk rather than retrieval rank alone. Second, we develop a spatial queue-regret decomposition for a stable queueing surrogate, linking demand-field error to wait through queueing sensitivity, allocator sensitivity, and Wasserstein pickup mismatch. Third, we evaluate learned retrieval and external-style rebalancing baselines in a common simulator. In the calibrated-demand gate experiment, across eight New York City scenarios and ten seeds, the spatial gate reduces mean wait to 82.3s, compared with 85.3s for hand-tuned similarity and 85.8s for a distributional-only baseline. In a separate replay-demand controller comparison, a scenario chance-MPC analog and a share-target transportation LP improve on Wen-style rebalancing (92.2s/92.2s vs. 100.1s), a reduced GPR chance-MPC comparator is intermediate at 94.4s, and an oracle MPC diagnostic is 91.3s.
Figures & tables
| Scenario | Calendar type | Time block |
|---|---|---|
| jan_nye_am | holiday | morning |
| jan_nye_pm | holiday | evening |
| jan_weekday_am | weekday | morning |
| jan_weekday_pm | weekday | evening |
| jan_weekend_mid | weekend | midday |
| jun_late_night | summer weekday | late night |
| Method | Wait (s) | Completion | Vs. replay (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spatial learned gate | 82.3 | 0.957 | 32.3 |
| Hand-tuned similarity | 85.3 | 0.959 | 31.2 |
| Distributional-only | 85.8 | 0.960 | 30.5 |
| Random simplex | 86.1 | 0.959 | 30.8 |
| Uniform weights | 86.6 | 0.961 | 30.0 |
| Replay demand | 123.0 | 0.957 | – |
| Method | Wait (s) | Completion | Vs. replay (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle MPC | 91.3 | 0.960 | 26.3 |
| Scenario chance MPC | 92.2 | 0.960 | 25.6 |
| Share-target LP | 92.2 | 0.960 | 25.5 |
| Spatial-gate share LP | 92.5 | 0.960 | 25.3 |
| GPR chance MPC-lite | 94.4 | 0.959 | 24.2 |
| Wen-style rebalancing | 100.1 | 0.959 | 18.7 |
| Config | Weights | Demand | Operational |
|---|---|---|---|
| no_queue | 0.30/0.70/0.00 | 0.938 | 0.469 |
| spatial_heavy | 0.15/0.70/0.15 | 0.936 | 0.451 |
| current | 0.25/0.55/0.20 | 0.935 | 0.448 |
| demand_heavy | 0.50/0.35/0.15 | 0.932 | 0.446 |
| queue_heavy | 0.20/0.40/0.40 | 0.939 | 0.443 |
| balanced | 0.34/0.33/0.33 | 0.935 | 0.443 |
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Scenario | Replay | Learned | Hand | Dist. | Random |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| jan_nye_am | 187.5 | 145.0 | 156.7 | 163.3 | 157.0 |
| jan_nye_pm | 152.4 | 72.5 | 91.5 | 89.3 | 102.9 |
| jan_weekday_am | 106.2 | 70.6 | 73.4 | 74.1 | 74.3 |
| jan_weekday_pm | 106.9 | 75.5 | 80.9 | 66.4 | 74.9 |
| jan_weekend_mid | 96.2 | 81.2 | 63.6 | 83.0 | 68.4 |
| jun_late_night | 127.9 | 64.3 | 69.7 | 63.4 | 69.1 |
| Scenario | Replay | Wen | Chance | LP | Spatial LP | Oracle |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| jan_nye_am | 187.5 | 156.0 | 153.3 | 153.4 | 153.7 | 153.0 |
| jan_nye_pm | 152.4 | 122.3 | 109.8 | 109.8 | 110.4 | 107.9 |
| jan_weekday_am | 106.2 | 85.9 | 81.3 | 80.9 | 81.0 | 79.0 |
| jan_weekday_pm | 106.9 | 86.7 | 78.2 | 78.1 | 78.4 | 77.3 |
| jan_weekend_mid | 96.2 | 79.7 | 71.4 | 71.8 | 71.7 | 71.3 |
| jun_late_night | 127.9 | 103.9 | 94.1 | 94.7 | 94.5 | 92.9 |
| Method | Wait (s) | Completion | Vs. replay (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contextual-DQN warm start | 112.9 | 0.958 | 8.3 |
| Batch replay | 123.2 | 0.957 | – |
| Method | Wait (s) | Completion | Low-charge/call |
|---|---|---|---|
| Central share LP | 97.2 | 0.960 | 0.0 |
| Charging-aware share LP | 99.1 | 0.960 | 11.2 |