论文标题
使用凸端最低成本流中的乘车市场中的车辆再分配
Vehicle Redistribution in Ride-Sourcing Markets using Convex Minimum Cost Flows
论文作者
论文摘要
乘车平台通常会面临其运营网络中各个地区的乘车需求和供应的不平衡。因此,动态定价方法已被用来通过飙升价格乘数来调节这些需求不对称,从而激发了更高的驾驶员参与市场。但是,自动驾驶汽车的预期商业化可能会将当前的乘车平台转换为车队运营商。人类驾驶员的缺乏促使需要空的车辆管理以解决任何车辆供应不足。在研究中提出了使用整数编程和需求预测模型的积极重新分配,以解决此问题。但是,现有模型的缺点是,它们忽略了市场结构和潜在的客户选择行为。因此,当前模型不会捕获重新分布的实际价值。为了解决这一问题,我们通过假设客户离散选择模型和市场结构来解释车辆重新分配问题作为非线性最低成本流问题,该问题解释了乘车的供求关系。我们证明了该模型可以具有凸形域,并且我们引入了一种边缘分裂算法来解决转换后的凸最小成本流量问题,以解决车辆重新分布。通过使用仿真测试我们的模型,我们表明我们的再分配算法可以将等待时间降低超过50%,将利润提高到最高10%,而车辆里程增加了20%。我们的发现概述了重新分配的价值取决于本地化市场结构和客户行为。
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.