• The Journal of The Korea Institute of Intelligent Transport Systems
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.118-133
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• 2020

Research interest in the Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) concept for enhancing users' mobility experience is increasing. In particular, dynamic pricing techniques based on reinforcement learning have emerged since adjusting prices based on the demand is expected to help mobility services, such as taxi and car-sharing services, to gain more profit. This paper provides a simulation framework that considers more practical factors, such as demand density per location, preferred prices, the distance between users and drivers, and distance to the destination that critically affect the probability of matching between the users and the mobility service providers (e.g., drivers). The aforementioned new practical features are reflected on a data structure referred to as the Matching Matrix. Using an efficient algorithm of computing the probability of matching between the users and drivers and given a set of precisely identified high-demand locations using HDBSCAN, this study developed a better reward function that can gear the reinforcement learning process towards finding more realistic dynamic pricing policies.