The growth in online goods delivery is causing a dramatic surge in urban vehicle traffic from last-mile deliveries. On the other hand, ride-sharing has been on the rise with the success of ride-sharing platforms and increased research on using autonomous vehicle technologies for routing and matching. The future of urban mobility for passengers and goods relies on leveraging new methods that minimize operational costs and environmental footprints of transportation systems.
This paper considers combining passenger transportation with goods delivery to improve vehicle-based transportation. Even though the problem has been studied with a defined dynamics model of the transportation system environment, this paper considers a model-free approach that has been demonstrated to be adaptable to new or erratic environment dynamics. We propose FlexPool, a distributed model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithm that jointly serves passengers & goods workloads by learning optimal dispatch policies from its interaction with the environment. The proposed algorithm pools passengers for a ride-sharing service and delivers goods using a multi-hop transit method. These flexibilities decrease the fleet's operational cost and environmental footprint while maintaining service levels for passengers and goods. Through simulations on a realistic multi-agent urban mobility platform, we demonstrate that FlexPool outperforms other model-free settings in serving the demands from passengers & goods. FlexPool achieves 30% higher fleet utilization and 35% higher fuel efficiency in comparison to (i) model-free approaches where vehicles transport a combination of passengers & goods without the use of multi-hop transit, and (ii) model-free approaches where vehicles exclusively transport either passengers or goods.
The ubiquitous growth of mobility-on-demand services for passenger and goods delivery has brought various challenges and opportunities within the realm of transportation systems. As a result, intelligent transportation systems are being developed to maximize operational profitability, user convenience, and environmental sustainability. The growth of last mile deliveries alongside ridesharing calls for an efficient and cohesive system that transports both passengers and goods. Existing methods address this using static routing methods considering neither the demands of requests nor the transfer…
It has been considered that urban air mobility (UAM), also known as drone-taxi or electrical vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL), will play a key role in future transportation. By putting UAM into practical future transportation, several benefits can be realized, i.e., (i) the total travel time of passengers can be reduced compared to traditional transportation and (ii) there is no environmental pollution and no special labor costs to operate the system because electric batteries will be used in UAM system. However, there are various dynamic and uncertain factors in the flight environment, i.…
A fundamental question in any peer-to-peer ride-sharing system is how to, both effectively and efficiently, meet the request of passengers to balance the supply and demand in real time. On the passenger side, traditional approaches focus on pricing strategies by increasing the probability of users' call to adjust the distribution of demand. However, previous methods do not take into account the impact of changes in strategy on future supply and demand changes, which means drivers are repositioned to different destinations due to passengers' calls, which will affect the driver's income for a pe…
Heterogeneous Vertiport Selection Optimization for On-Demand Air Taxi Services: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）科学与工程学院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学集成服务网络国家重点实验室）；Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）
On-demand ride-pooling (e.g., UberPool) has recently become popular because of its ability to lower costs for passengers while simultaneously increasing revenue for drivers and aggregation companies. Unlike in Taxi on Demand (ToD) services -- where a vehicle is only assigned one passenger at a time -- in on-demand ride-pooling, each (possibly partially filled) vehicle can be assigned a group of passenger requests with multiple different origin and destination pairs. To ensure near real-time response, existing solutions to the real-time ride-pooling problem are myopic in that they optimise the …
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Didi Chuxing Inc.（滴滴出行有限公司）；National Maglev Transportation Engineering R&D Center, Tongji University（同济大学国家磁浮交通工程技术研究中心）；University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, University of Michigan（密歇根大学密歇根大学交通研究所）；Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan（密歇根大学福特公共政策学院）
Vacant taxi drivers' passenger seeking process in a road network generates additional vehicle miles traveled, adding congestion and pollution into the road network and the environment. This paper aims to employ a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to model idle e-hailing drivers' optimal sequential decisions in passenger-seeking. Transportation network companies (TNC) or e-hailing (e.g., Didi, Uber) drivers exhibit different behaviors from traditional taxi drivers because e-hailing drivers do not need to actually search for passengers. Instead, they reposition themselves so that the matching platfo…
Real-Time Communication-Aware Ride-Sharing Route Planning for Urban Air Mobility: A Multi-Source Hybrid Attention Reinforcement Learning Approach
School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（科学与工程学院，香港中文大学（深圳））；Xidian University State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Network（西安电子科技大学集成服务网络国家重点实验室）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyung Hee University（庆北大学计算机科学与工程系）
Transportation services play a crucial part in the development of modern smart cities. In particular, on-demand ridesharing services, which group together passengers with similar itineraries, are already operating in several metropolitan areas. These services can be of significant social and environmental benefit, by reducing travel costs, road congestion and CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, despite their advantages, not many people opt to use these ridesharing services. We believe that increasing the user satisfaction from the service will cause more people to utilize it, which, in turn, will im…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Didi Chuxing（滴滴出行）
In recent years, online ride-hailing platforms have become an indispensable part of urban transportation. After a passenger is matched up with a driver by the platform, both the passenger and the driver have the freedom to simply accept or cancel a ride with one click. Hence, accurately predicting whether a passenger-driver pair is a good match turns out to be crucial for ride-hailing platforms to devise instant order assignments. However, since the users of ride-hailing platforms consist of two parties, decision-making needs to simultaneously account for the dynamics from both the driver and …
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering（康考迪亚大学信息系统工程研究所）
The culture of sharing instead of ownership is sharply increasing in individuals behaviors. Particularly in transportation, concepts of sharing a ride in either carpooling or ridesharing have been recently adopted. An efficient optimization approach to match passengers in real-time is the core of any ridesharing system. In this paper, we model ridesharing as an online matching problem on general graphs such that passengers do not drive private cars and use shared taxis. We propose an optimization algorithm to solve it. The outlined algorithm calculates the optimal waiting time when a passenger…
In this paper, we describe a case study in a big metropolis, in which from data collected by digital sensors, we tried to understand mobility patterns of persons using buses and how this can generate knowledge to suggest interventions that are applied incrementally into the transportation network in use. We have first estimated an Origin-Destination matrix of buses users from datasets about the ticket validation and GPS positioning of buses. Then we represent the supply of buses with their routes through bus stops as a complex network, which allowed us to understand the bottlenecks of the curr…
Smart Metro: Deep Learning Approaches to Forecasting the MRT Line 3 Ridership
Technological University of the Philippines（菲律宾技术大学）；National University（国立大学）；Philippine Coding Camp（菲律宾编程营）；University of the Philippines Open University（菲律宾大学开放大学）
University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambrésis（瓦伦谢纳与埃诺-康布雷西大学）；University of Sfax（斯法克斯大学）；University of Louisiana at Lafayette（路易斯安那大学拉斐特分校）
There is a relatively small amount of research covering urban freight movements. Most research dealing with the subject of urban mobility focuses on passenger vehicles, not commercial vehicles hauling freight. However, in many ways, urban freight transport contributes to congestion, air pollution, noise, accident and more fuel consumption which raises logistic costs, and hence the price of products. The main focus of this paper is to propose a new solution for congestion in order to improve the distribution process of goods in urban areas and optimize transportation cost, time of delivery, fue…
