Henry L. Pierce Laboratory Seminar Series

Towards Better Planning of Shared Mobility

Shared mobility refers to transportation assets that provide on-demand services to entities that do not own these assets. Smart uses of shared mobility can generate profitable business opportunities and enhance the efficiency of resource allocation. In this talk, we will discuss two of such uses. We first examine one-way electric vehicle (EV) sharing services. In particular, we study the planning problem faced by service providers in designing a geographical service region in which to operate the services. We develop a mathematical programming model that incorporates details of both customer adoption behavior and fleet management (including EV repositioning and charging). Using the case study of Car2Go's service with real operations data, we address a number of planning questions. In the second part, we study shared mobility for last-mile package delivery. We present models to characterize open-loop vehicle routes, vehicle drivers?????? wage-response behavior and optimal sizing of service zones within which passenger vehicles pick up goods and fulfill the last-mile delivery. We find that a transition to this paradigm has the potential of creating economic benefits by exploiting additional operational flexibility. We also discuss the environmental implications of both of these two business models using shared mobility.