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1. Off-Street Parking for TNC Vehicles to Reduce Cruising Traffic

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CDC42340.2020.9304277  

   Li, Sen ; Qin, Junjie ; Yang, Hai ; Poolla, Kameshwar ; Varaiya, Pravin ( December 2020 , 2020 59th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC))

   null (Ed.)

   This paper considers off-street parking for the cruising vehicles of transportation network companies (TNCs) to reduce the traffic congestion. We propose a novel business that integrates the shared parking service into the TNC platform. In the proposed model, the platform (a) provides interfaces that connect passengers, drivers and garage operators (commercial or private garages); (b) determines the ride fare, driver payment, and parking rates; (c) matches passengers to TNC vehicles for ride-hailing services; and (d) matches vacant TNC vehicles to unoccupied parking garages to reduce the cruising cost. A queuing-theoretic model is proposed to capture the matching process of passengers, drivers, and parking garages. A market-equilibrium model is developed to capture the incentives of the passengers, drivers, and garage operators. An optimization-based model is formulated to capture the optimal pricing of the TNC platform. Through a realistic case study, we show that the proposed business model will offer a Pareto improvement that benefits all stakeholders, which leads to higher passenger surplus, higher drivers surplus, higher garage operator surplus, higher platform profit, and reduced traffic congestion. 

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2. Distance-Aware Competitive Spatiotemporal Searching Using Spatiotemporal Resource Matrix Factorization (GIS Cup)

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3347146.3363350  

   Kim, Joon-Seok ; Pfoser, Dieter ; Züfle, Andreas ( November 2019 , Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems)

   Congested traffic wastes billions of liters of fuel and is a significant contributor to Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Although convenient, ride sharing services such as Uber and Lyft are becoming a significant contributor to these emissions not only because of added traffic but by spending time on the road while waiting for passengers. To help improve the impact of ride sharing, we propose an algorithm to optimize the efficiency of drivers searching for customers. In our model, the main goal is to direct drivers represented as idle agents, i.e., not currently assigned a customer or resource, to locations where we predict new resources to appear. Our approach uses non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to model and predict the spatio-temporal distributions of resources. To choose destinations for idle agents, we employ a greedy heuristic that strikes a balance between distance greed, i.e., to avoid long trips without resources and resource greed, i.e., to move to a location where resources are expected to appear following the NMF model. To ensure that agents do not oversupply areas for which resources are predicted and under supply other areas, we randomize the destinations of agents using the predicted resource distribution within the local neighborhood of an agent. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach reduces the search time of agents and the wait time of resources using real-world data from Manhattan, New York, USA. 

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3. DILSA+: Predicting Urban Dispersal Events through Deep Survival Analysis with Enhanced Urban Features

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3469085  

   Khezerlou, Amin Vahedian ; Zhou, Xun ; Li, Xinyi ; Street, W. Nick ; Li, Yanhua ( August 2021 , ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology)

   Urban dispersal events occur when an unexpectedly large number of people leave an area in a relatively short period of time. It is beneficial for the city authorities, such as law enforcement and city management, to have an advance knowledge of such events, as it can help them mitigate the safety risks and handle important challenges such as managing traffic, and so forth. Predicting dispersal events is also beneficial to Taxi drivers and/or ride-sharing services, as it will help them respond to an unexpected demand and gain competitive advantage. Large urban datasets such as detailed trip records and point of interest ( POI ) data make such predictions achievable. The related literature mainly focused on taxi demand prediction. The pattern of the demand was assumed to be repetitive and proposed methods aimed at capturing those patterns. However, dispersal events are, by definition, violations of those patterns and are, understandably, missed by the methods in the literature. We proposed a different approach in our prior work [32]. We showed that dispersal events can be predicted by learning the complex patterns of arrival and other features that precede them in time. We proposed a survival analysis formulation of this problem and proposed a two-stage framework (DILSA), where a deep learning model predicted the survival function at each point in time in the future. We used that prediction to determine the time of the dispersal event in the future, or its non-occurrence. However, DILSA is subject to a few limitations. First, based on evidence from the data, mobility patterns can vary through time at a given location. DILSA does not distinguish between different mobility patterns through time. Second, mobility patterns are also different for different locations. DILSA does not have the capability to directly distinguish between different locations based on their mobility patterns. In this article, we address these limitations by proposing a method to capture the interaction between POIs and mobility patterns and we create vector representations of locations based on their mobility patterns. We call our new method DILSA+. We conduct extensive case studies and experiments on the NYC Yellow taxi dataset from 2014 to 2016. Results show that DILSA+ can predict events in the next 5 hours with an F1-score of 0.66. It is significantly better than DILSA and the state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for taxi demand prediction. 

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4. Optimal Operations Management of Mobility-on-Demand Systems

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2021.681096  

   Wollenstein-Betech, Salomón ; Paschalidis, Ioannis Ch. ; Cassandras, Christos G. ( July 2021 , Frontiers in Sustainable Cities)

   null (Ed.)

   The emergence of the sharing economy in urban transportation networks has enabled new fast, convenient and accessible mobility services referred to as Mobilty-on-Demand systems (e.g., Uber, Lyft, DiDi). These platforms have flourished in the last decade around the globe and face many operational challenges in order to be competitive and provide good quality of service. A crucial step in the effective operation of these systems is to reduce customers' waiting time while properly selecting the optimal fleet size and pricing policy. In this paper, we jointly tackle three operational decisions: (i) fleet size, (ii) pricing, and (iii) rebalancing, in order to maximize the platform's profit or its customers' welfare. To accomplish this, we first devise an optimization framework which gives rise to a static policy. Then, we elaborate and propose dynamic policies that are more responsive to perturbations such as unexpected increases in demand. We test this framework in a simulation environment using three case studies and leveraging traffic flow and taxi data from Eastern Massachusetts, New York City, and Chicago. Our results show that solving the problem jointly could increase profits between 1% and up to 50%, depending on the benchmark. Moreover, we observe that the proposed fleet size yield utilization of the vehicles in the fleet is around 75% compared to private vehicle utilization of 5%. 

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5. Dynamic Pricing for Autonomous Vehicle E-hailing Services Reliability and Performance Improvement

   https://doi.org/10.1109/COASE.2019.8843122  

   Wang, Qixing ; Miao, Fei ; Wu, Jie ; Niu, Yuan ; Wang, Chengliang ; Lownes, Nicholas E. ( September 2019 , IEEE 15th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE))

   As Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) become possible for E-hailing services operate, especially when telecom companies start deploying next-generation wireless networks (known as 5G), many new technologies may be applied in these vehicles. Dynamic-route-switching is one of these technologies, which could help vehicles find the best possible route based on real-time traffic information. However, allowing all AVs to choose their own optimal routes is not the best solution for a complex city network, since each vehicle ignores its negative effect on the road system due to the additional congestion it creates. As a result, with this system, some of the links may become over-congested, causing the whole road network system performance to degrade. Meanwhile, the travel time reliability, especially during the peak hours, is an essential factor to improve the customers' ride experience. Unfortunately, these two issues have received relatively less attention. In this paper, we design a link-based dynamic pricing model to improve the road network system and travel time reliability at the same time. In this approach, we assume that all links are eligible with the dynamic pricing, and AVs will be perfect informed with update traffic condition and follow the dynamic road pricing. A heuristic approach is developed to address this computationally difficult problem. The output includes link-based surcharge, new travel demand and traffic condition which would improve the system performance close to the System Optimal (SO) solution and maintain the travel time reliability. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model to the well-known test Sioux Falls network. 

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