Ride-sourcing platforms often face imbalances in the demand and supply of rides across areas in their operating road-networks. As such, dynamic pricing methods have been used to mediate these demand asymmetries through surge price multipliers, thus incentivising higher driver participation in the market. However, the anticipated commercialisation of autonomous vehicles could transform the current ride-sourcing platforms to fleet operators. The absence of human drivers fosters the need for empty vehicle management to address any vehicle supply deficiencies. Proactive redistribution using integer programming and demand predictive models have been proposed in research to address this problem. A shortcoming of existing models, however, is that they ignore the market structure and underlying customer choice behaviour. As such, current models do not capture the real value of redistribution. To resolve this, we formulate the vehicle redistribution problem as a non-linear minimum cost flow problem which accounts for the relationship of supply and demand of rides, by assuming a customer discrete choice model and a market structure. We demonstrate that this model can have a convex domain, and we introduce an edge splitting algorithm to solve a transformed convex minimum cost flow problem for vehicle redistribution. By testing our model using simulation, we show that our redistribution algorithm can decrease wait times by more than 50%, increase profit up to 10% with less than 20% increase in vehicle mileage. Our findings outline that the value of redistribution is contingent on localised market structure and customer behaviour.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Vehicle Redistribution in Ride-Sourcing Markets Using Convex Minimum Cost Flows




    Publication date :

    2022-08-01


    Size :

    1588390 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Economic analysis of ride-sourcing markets

    Zha, Liteng | Online Contents | 2016


    Dynamic Pricing in One-Sided Autonomous Ride-Sourcing Markets

    Karamanis, Renos / Angeloudis, Panagiotis / Sivakumar, Aruna et al. | IEEE | 2018


    Calibration and validation of matching functions for ride-sourcing markets

    Shuqing Wei / Siyuan Feng / Jintao Ke et al. | DOAJ | 2022

    Free access

    SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING PASSENGER-SEEKING RIDE-SOURCING VEHICLE NAVIGATION

    KE JINTAO / WU GUOJUN / XU ZHENGTIAN et al. | European Patent Office | 2020

    Free access

    Ride Acceptance Behaviour Investigation of Ride-sourcing Drivers Through Agent-based Simulation

    Ghasemi, Farnoud / Ashkrof, Peyman / Kucharski, Rafal | TIBKAT | 2022

    Free access