Regime-Calibrated Demand Priors for Ride-Hailing Fleet Dispatch and Repositioning

Abstract

Effective ride-hailing dispatch requires anticipating demand patterns that vary substantially across time-of-day, day-of-week, season, and special events. We propose a regime-calibrated approach that (i) segments historical trip data into demand regimes, (ii) matches the current operating period to the most similar historical analogues via a similarity ensemble combining Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance, Wasserstein-1 distance, feature distance, variance ratio, event pattern similarity, and temporal proximity, and (iii) uses the resulting calibrated demand prior to drive both an LP-based fleet repositioning policy and batch dispatch with Hungarian matching. In ablation, a distributional-only metric subset achieves the strongest mean-wait reduction, while the full ensemble is retained as a robustness-oriented default that preserves calendar and event context. Evaluated on 5.2 million NYC TLC trips across 8 diverse scenarios (winter/summer, weekday/weekend/holiday, morning/evening/night) with 5 random seeds each, our method reduces mean rider wait times by 31.1% (bootstrap 95% CI: [26.5, 36.6]; Friedman chi-squared = 80.0, p = 4.25e-18; Cohen's d = 7.5-29.9). P95 wait drops 37.6% and the Gini coefficient of wait times improves from 0.441 to 0.409. The two contributions compose multiplicatively: calibration provides 16.9% reduction relative to the replay baseline; LP repositioning adds a further 15.5%. The approach requires no training, is deterministic and explainable, generalizes to Chicago (23.3% wait reduction using the NYC-built regime library without retraining), and is robust across fleet sizes (32-47% improvement for 0.5x-2.0x fleet scaling). Code is available at https://github.com/IndarKarhana/regime-calibrated-dispatch.