EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

625. Price optimization for demand responsive transport

Invited abstract in session WA-30: Shared Mobility Optimization I, stream Shared Mobility Optimization.

Wednesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: Maurice Keyworth 1.05

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Christine Currie
School of Mathematics, University of Southampton
2. Julia Bennell
Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds
3. Richlove Frimpong
King's College London
4. Rym M'Hallah
Engineering, King's College London

Abstract

A demand responsive transport (DRT) service operates a fleet of vehicles that are used to transport customers between their individual pick up and drop off locations. Unlike a taxi service, customers may share a vehicle for part of their journey. Similar rideshare services have been introduced across the world as a way of reducing the environmental impact of transport. We implement dynamic pricing in combination with routing and scheduling to improve the financial sustainability of DRT and use this model to investigate how successful DRT is under different scenarios. Within a DRT system, customers first submit a request for service including when they wish to travel and their pickup and drop off points. The system then returns a set of options for them to choose from. We set up the problem of maximising the expected profit as a dynamic program using a choice model to estimate the probabilities that a customer will choose each of the offered. Data from a stated preference survey of Leeds residents is used to fit the choice model while demand data is determined from transport surveys carried out by Leeds City Council. We use approximate dynamic programming techniques combined with routing and scheduling heuristics to estimate the optimal prices to charge for a journey and the routing of the vehicles. The talk will describe the context of the work, the methods we have designed and some preliminary results.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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