A dynamic ridesharing dispatch and idle vehicle repositioning strategy with integrated transit transfers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dynamic ridesharing and transit integration strategy that significantly reduces travel and journey times, demonstrating substantial benefits in high-demand urban scenarios through customized algorithms and case studies.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated dispatch and repositioning strategy with tailored algorithms, showing substantial efficiency gains in ridesharing and transit cooperation.

Findings

Vehicle travel time reduced by 40-60%

Passenger journey times cut by 50-60% in high demand

Operational costs decreased by up to 60% in case study

Abstract

We propose a ridesharing strategy with integrated transit in which a private on-demand mobility service operator may drop off a passenger directly door-to-door, commit to dropping them at a transit station or picking up from a transit station, or to both pickup and drop off at two different stations with different vehicles. We study the effectiveness of online solution algorithms for this proposed strategy. Queueing-theoretic vehicle dispatch and idle vehicle relocation algorithms are customized for the problem. Several experiments are conducted first with a synthetic instance to design and test the effectiveness of this integrated solution method, the influence of different model parameters, and measure the benefit of such cooperation. Results suggest that rideshare vehicle travel time can drop by 40-60% consistently while passenger journey times can be reduced by 50-60% when demand is high. A case study of Long Island commuters to New York City (NYC) suggests having the proposed operating strategy can substantially cut user journey times and operating costs by up to 54% and 60% each for a range of 10-30 taxis initiated per zone. This result shows that there are settings where such service is highly warranted.