The job of public transport, ride-hailing and delivery drivers: Conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic and implications for a post-pandemic future

Transport workers were among the most affected by the COVID-19 crisis. In several countries, public transport and delivery drivers were considered essential workers during the pandemic, while the demand changed dramatically. In this context, little is known about the actual effects of the pandemic on the lives of drivers, and whether those...

Economies and diseconomies of scale in on-demand ridepooling systems

We analyse the sources of economies and diseconomies of scale in On-Demand Ridepooling (ODRP), disentangling three effects: when demand grows, average costs are reduced due to i) a larger fleet that diminishes waiting and walking times (Mohring Effect), and ii) matching users with more similar routes (Better-matching Effect). A counter...

Group-Based Distributed Auction Algorithms for Multi-Robot Task Assignment

This paper studies the multi-robot task assignment problem in which a fleet of dispersed robots needs to efficiently transport a set of dynamically appearing packages from their initial locations to corresponding destinations within prescribed time-windows. Each robot can carry multiple packages simultaneously within its capacity. Given a...

How to split the costs and charge the travellers sharing a ride? aligning system's optimum with users’ equilibrium

Emerging on-demand sharing alternatives, in which one resource is utilised simultaneously by a circumstantial group of users, entail several challenges regarding how to coordinate such users. A very relevant case refers to how to form groups in a mobility system that offers shared rides, and how to split the costs within the travellers of a...

Routing of Heterogeneous Fleets for Flash Deliveries via Vehicle Group Assignment

This paper presents a novel approach to route heterogeneous fleets for flash delivery operations. Flash deliveries offer to serve customers' wishes in minutes. We investigate a scenario that allows to pick up orders at multiple depots with a heterogeneous vehicle fleet leveraging different modes of transportation. We propose the Heterogeneous...

Optimal Item Pricing in Online Combinatorial Auctions

We consider a fundamental pricing problem in combinatorial auctions. We are given a set of indivisible items and a set of buyers with randomly drawn monotone valuations over subsets of items. A decision maker sets item prices and then the buyers make sequential purchasing decisions, taking their favorite set among the remaining items. We...

Optimizing a vehicle’s route in an on-demand ridesharing system in which users might walk

Within the context of a shared on-demand transport system, we study the problem of selecting the stopping points from which passengers should walk to their exact destinations (or from their exact origins). We focus on the single-vehicle case that must follow a predefined order of requests, posing the mathematical program, showing that it can...

Assessment of the socio-spatial effects of urban transport investment using Google Maps API

We analyze the spatially distributed impacts of transport investment in urban highways and public transport with a novel methodology based on the capabilities of online technology to replicate the (unobserved) condition without highways. This is based upon the intensive use of Google Maps API (GMA) to obtain travel times between each origin...

Anticipatory routing methods for an on-demand ridepooling mobility system

On-demand mobility systems in which passengers use the same vehicle simultaneously are a promising transport mode, yet difficult to control. One of the most relevant challenges relates to the spatial imbalances of the demand, which induce a mismatch between the position of the vehicles and the origins of the emerging requests. Most...

On-demand ridesharing with optimized pick-up and drop-off walking locations

On-demand systems in which passengers with similar routes can share a vehicle are expected to become a relevant part of future mobility, thanks to their flexibility and their potential impact on reducing congestion. Nevertheless, due to the long detours required by a door-to-door scheme, they induce extra costs to the users in terms of delay....

On-Demand Grocery Delivery from Multiple Local Stores with Autonomous Robots

The advances in the area of autonomous delivery robots combined with customers' desire for fast delivery, bare potential for same-day delivery operations, specifically with small time windows between ordering and delivery. Most same-day deliveries are operated using a single depot and with vehicles' routes planned and fixed when leaving the...

Towards a geographically even level of service in on-demand ridepooling

On-demand ridepooling systems usually need to decide which requests to serve, when the number of vehicles is not enough to transport them all with waiting times that are acceptable by the users. When doing so, they tend to provide uneven service rates, concentrating rejections in some zones within the operation area. In this paper, we propose...

The sharing economy and the job market: the case of ride-hailing drivers in Chile

Ride-hailing (ridesourcing) companies such as Uber, Lyft, and Didi Chuxing have been a disruptive force in the urban mobility landscape around the world during the past decade. In this paper, we analyse the working conditions, earnings, and job satisfaction of ride-hailing drivers. We begin by discussing the regulatory, labour, financial, and...

A water-filling primal-dual algorithm for approximating non-linear covering problems

Obtaining strong linear relaxations of capacitated covering problems constitute a significant technical challenge even for simple settings. For one of the most basic cases, the Knapsack-Cover (Min-Knapsack) problem, the relaxation based on knapsack-cover inequalities has an integrality gap of 2. These inequalities are exploited in more...

Unreliability in ridesharing systems: Measuring changes in users’ times due to new requests

On-demand systems in which several users can ride simultaneously the same vehicle have great potential to improve mobility while reducing congestion. Nevertheless, they have a significant drawback: the actual realization of a trip depends on the other users with whom it is shared, as they might impose extra detours that increase the waiting...

If you are late, everyone is late: late passenger arrival and ride-pooling systems' performance

Sharing rides in on-demand systems allow passengers to reduce their fares and service providers to increase revenue, though at the cost of adding uncertainty to the system. Notably, the uncertainty of ride-pooling systems stems not only from travel times but also from unique features of sharing, such as the dependency on other passengers'...

Lines spacing and scale economies in the strategic design of transit systems in a parametric city

In this paper, we incorporate the spacing of transit lines in addition to frequencies, vehicle sizes and routes in both the design and the analysis of scale economies in transit systems. First, we present a way of looking at lines spacing in a simple parallel-lines-model whose properties regarding optimal design and scale economies are...