Effects of Dynamic and Stochastic Travel Times on the Operation of Mobility-on-Demand Services

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dynamic and stochastic travel times affect Mobility-on-Demand services, revealing that inaccuracies and route infeasibility significantly impair performance and customer experience, with limited improvements from re-assignments.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation framework coupling microscopic traffic simulation with MoD service models to analyze the impact of travel time uncertainties.

Findings

Inaccurate travel time estimates worsen MoD performance.

Damage control strategies have limited effectiveness.

Re-assignments slightly improve system reliability.

Abstract

Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) services have been an active research topic in recent years. Many studies focused on developing control algorithms to supply efficient services. To cope with a large search space to solve the underlying vehicle routing problem, studies usually apply hard time-constraints on pick-up and drop-off while considering static network travel times to reduce computational time. As travel times in real street networks are dynamic and stochastic, assigned routes considered feasible by the control algorithm in one time step might become infeasible in the next. Since once assigned and confirmed, customers should still be part of the solution, damage control is necessary to counteract this effect. In this study, a detailed simulation framework for MoD services is coupled with a microscopic traffic simulation to create dynamic and stochastic travel times, and tested in a case study for Munich, Germany. Results showed that the combination of inaccurate travel time estimation and damage control strategies for infeasible routes deteriorates the performance of MoD services -- hailing and pooling -- significantly. Moreover, customers suffer from unreliable pick-up time and travel time estimations. Allowing re-assignments of initial vehicle schedules according to updated system states helps to restore system efficiency and reliability, but only to a minor extent.