Environmental Data Collection as a Byproduct for Autonomous Ride-Hailing Services

Shared mobility systems such as ride-hailing services transform urban mobility and have the potential to increase the efficiency of road transport. In this paper, we examine the possibility to establish the collection and daily updating of highly dynamic environmental data as a side-business for autonomous ride-hailing companies. We suggest a rebalancing heuristic that lets the vehicles drive through as many roads of the city as possible to collect data without neglecting the ride-hailing customers. To quantify this routing scheme's effects, we perform a case study with 100 vehicles for 24 hours in Hamburg, Germany, based on an on-demand mobility provider's vehicle data. We observe a gain of gathered data of almost 28% while there is a service decline of 1.6% with respect to the number of served customers. If we want to increase the share of daily gathered data to 95% of the road network, we need at least 131 ride-hailing vehicles. The presented rebalancing policy is also transferable to other fleet service operations or regular commuting vehicles like taxis and buses.