Adjustment of the Number of Ride-Sharing Vehicles by Introducing the predeclaration on the expected time period of use

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a user ’s pre-declaration for her demand in order to improve a on-demand ridesharing operation plan by decreasing the number of vehicles. While a reservation requires a user to declare a precise riding time, we allow users to report a certain time period in advance. We evaluate the effectiveness of pre-declaration by computational simulations. In more detail, we evaluate the number of vehicles based on users’ pre-declarations to satisfy the threshold condition for average pick-up time by running computational simulations. However, A detailed simulation requires huge computation time. To solve this problem, we propose a method to determine the number of vehicles to run a simulation by applying Bayesian optimization. In the proposed method, the acquisition function is used to search for the number of vehicles whose average pickup time is around a threshold value. The experimental results show that the proposed method works well in reducing the number of vehicles.