L2R-EV: Learning What to Repair in Electric Ride-Pooling with Finite Charger Queues
Abstract: Electric ride-pooling must jointly manage passenger service, routes, batteries, and finite chargers; a locally useful relocation can reduce later service. We introduce a discrete-event ride-pooling simulator with ordered passenger stops, pickup and ride-time constraints, battery reserves, charger travel, and finite first-come, first-served (FCFS) charging queues. On top of a common dispatcher, we add a learned repair layer that moves uncollected passengers between vehicles, uses a supervised score to estimate later effects, and uses a two-stage proximal-policy-optimization (PPO) policy to focus computation on promising moves. Every executed move must satisfy route, battery, and time constraints and provide an immediate route-cost improvement. For larger instances, we limit the number of candidate moves and apply several non-conflicting repairs at once. On 12 held-out Manhattan episodes with 100 requests, 30 EVs, and one plug per station, supervised repair reduces operational cost by 6.57\% versus no repair (12/12 wins) and serves 74.92 rather than 72.75 requests. Two-stage PPO stays within 1.43\% of supervised repair with 95.4\% fewer exact trials, while our experiments scale to 8,000 requests and 2,400 EVs with cost reductions across all three larger development settings. Queue-aware charging reduces waiting by 41.0\%; under a declared 1.5-kW queue-idle load, operational electricity per served request falls 1.73\%.