Vehicle Rebalancing for Mobility-on-Demand Systems with Ride-Sharing

Recent developments in Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) systems have demonstrated the potential of road vehicles as an efficient mode of urban transportation Newly developed algorithms can compute vehicle routes in real-time for batches of requests and allow for multiple requests to share vehicles. These algorithms have primarily focused on optimally producing vehicle schedules to pick up and drop off requests. The redistribution of idle vehicles to areas of high demand, known as rebalancing, on the contrary has received little attention in the context of ride-sharing. In this paper, we present a method to rebalance idle vehicles in a ride-sharing enabled MoD fleet. This method consists of an algorithm to optimally partition the fleet operating area into rebalancing regions, an algorithm to determine a real-time demand estimate for every region using incoming requests, and an algorithm to optimize the assignment of idle vehicles to these rebalancing regions using an integer linear program. Evaluation with historical taxi data from Manhattan shows that we can service 99.8% of taxi requests in Manhattan using 3000 vehicles with an average waiting time of 57.4 seconds and an average in-car delay of 13.7 seconds. Moreover, we can achieve a higher service rate using 2000 vehicles than prior work achieved with 3000. Furthermore, with a fleet of 3000 vehicles, we reduce the average travel delay by 86%, the average waiting time by 37%, and the amount of ignored requests by 95% compared to earlier work at the expense of an increased distance travelled by the fleet.