Solutions to Increase Efficiency in the Ride-Hailing Marketplace: Researchers Recognized with INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize

CATONSVILLE, MD, November 7, 2019 – INFORMS, the leading association for operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals, has awarded the 2019 Daniel H. Wagner  Prize for Excellence in the Practice of Advanced Analytics and Operations Research to researchers from DiDi Research America and Didi Chuxing Technology Co. for their work to increase efficiency in the ride-hailing marketplace. The award was presented October 21 at the 2019 INFORMS Annual Meeting in Seattle. 

The work generates long-term solutions to the challenges of dispatching for ride-hailing services with an increase in supply and demand.

The prize-winning paper, “Ride-hailing Order Dispatching on DiDi via Reinforcement Learning,” provides unique applications of analytics and O.R. to improve the system performance of these services and achieve multiobjectives. The researchers looked at data from the ride-hailing platform, DiDi, which is popular in China.

Congratulations to Zhiwei Qin, Xiaocheng Tang and Yan Jiao of DiDi Research America, and Fan Zhang, Zhe Xu, Hongtu Zhu and Jieping Ye of Didi Chuxing Technology Co.

The additional finalists for the 2019 award were:

• Pricing Analytics for Rotable Spare Parts
  • Omar Besbes, Adam Elmachtoub and Yunjie Sun, Columbia University

• London Heathrow Airport Uses Real-time Analytics for Improving Operations
  • Xiaojia Guo and Bert De Reyck, University College London 
  • Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Harvard Business School

• Daily Tutor Scheduling Support at Hopeful Journeys Educational Center
  • Matthew Bailey and Lucas Waddell, Bucknell University

• Empowering Denver Public Schools System to Optimize School Bus Operations
  • Amanda Chu and Pinar Keskinocak, Georgia Institute of Technology and Denver Public Schools

About INFORMS

With 12,500 members from nearly 90 countries, INFORMS is the largest international association of operations research (O.R.) and analytics professionals and students. INFORMS provides unique networking and learning opportunities for individual professionals, and organizations of all types and sizes, to better understand and use O.R. and analytics tools and methods to transform strategic visions and achieve better outcomes. Visit www.informs.org or @informs.

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Contact:

Ashley Smith

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