Leveraging Eclipse MOSAIC for Modeling and Analyzing Ride-Hailing Services

TL;DR

This paper extends the Eclipse MOSAIC simulation framework to model and analyze ride-hailing services in Berlin, incorporating real-world data and environmental impacts, providing new insights into traffic and pollution effects of rebalancing strategies.

Contribution

The paper introduces novel extensions to the MOSAIC framework for ride-hailing modeling and performs city-wide environmental impact analysis, a previously unaddressed aspect.

Findings

Rebalancing strategies significantly affect emissions and mileage.

Extended MOSAIC can simulate ride-hailing scenarios with real-world data.

Environmental impacts at city scale are substantial and measurable.

Abstract

Ride-hailing services enjoy a large popularity in the sector of individualized mobility. Due to broad availability, ease of use, and competitive pricing strategies, these services have established themselves throughout the last decades. With the increased popularity, ride-hailing providers aimed to consistently improve the efficiency of their services, leading to the inception of novel research questions. Many of which can be effectively tackled using simulation. In this paper, we present such a simulation-based approach using Eclipse MOSAIC in-hand with a large-scale traffic scenario of Berlin. We analyze real-world logbook data including detailed shifts of drivers and discuss how to integrate them with the simulation scenario. Moreover, we present extensions to MOSAIC required for the modeling of the ride-hailing services, utilizing the powerful Application Simulator. Accordingly, as the primary result of this paper, we managed to extend the Eclipse MOSAIC framework to be able to answer research questions in the domain of ride-hailing and ride-sharing. Additionally, in an initial exemplary study, we analyze the traffic and environmental impacts of different, yet basic, rebalancing strategies, finding non-negligible differences in mileages and pollutant emissions. We, furthermore, applied our findings to the entire ride-hailing fleet in the city of Berlin for one year, showcasing the impacts different rebalancing strategies could have on environment and general traffic. To our knowledge, the consideration of environmental factors on a city-wide scale is a novel contribution of this paper, not addressed in previous research.