  For on-demand dynamic ride-pooling services, e.g., Uber Pool and Didi Pinche,
a well-designed vehicle dispatching strategy is crucial for platform
profitability and passenger experience. Most existing dispatching strategies
overlook incoming pairing opportunities, therefore suffer from short-sighted
limitations. In this paper, we propose a forward-looking vehicle dispatching
strategy, which first predicts the expected distance saving that could be
brought about by future orders and then solves a bipartite matching problem
based on the prediction to match passengers with partially occupied or vacant
vehicles or keep passengers waiting for next rounds of matching. To demonstrate
the performance of the proposed strategy, a number of simulation experiments
and comparisons are conducted based on the real-world road network and
historical trip data from Haikou, China. Results show that the proposed
strategy outperform the baseline strategies by generating approximately 31\%
more distance saving and 18\% less average passenger detour distance. It
indicates the significant benefits of considering future pairing opportunities
in dispatching, and highlights the effectiveness of our innovative
forward-looking vehicle dispatching strategy in improving system efficiency and
user experience for dynamic ride-pooling services.
