Fed-LTD: Towards Cross-Platform Ride Hailing via Federated Learning to Dispatch

Learning based order dispatching has witnessed tremendous success in ride hailing. However, the success halts within individual ride hailing platforms because sharing raw order dispatching data across platforms may leak user privacy and business secrets. Such data isolation not only impairs user experience but also decreases the potential revenues of the platforms. In this paper, we advocate federated order dispatching for cross-platform ride hailing, where multiple platforms collaboratively make dispatching decisions without sharing their local data. Realizing this concept calls for new federated learning strategies that tackle the unique challenges on effectiveness, privacy and efficiency in the context of order dispatching. In response, we devise Federated Learning-to-Dispatch (Fed-LTD), a framework that allows effective order dispatching by sharing both dispatching models and decisions while providing privacy protection of raw data and high efficiency. We validate Fed-LTD via large-scale trace-driven experiments with Didi GAIA dataset. Extensive evaluations show that Fed-LTD outperforms single-platform order dispatching by 10.24% to 54.07% in terms of total revenue.