Modelling and optimizing the real-time matching processes in a ride-sourcing market

Abstract

The e-hailing system brings about a drastic change in the people's travel pattern in daily life. The commonly used dispatching framework is that the platform pairs the customers and idle vehicles in each certain time interval and in a certain radius around each customer according to certain criteria such as distance. For provision of better service quality and enhancement of system efficiency, this paper proposes to jointly optimize the two key important variables of matching time interval and searching radius for dispatching of ride-sourcing vehicles, develops a model to investigate the influences of the matching time interval and searching radius on the platform and the market. In general, the ride-sourcing dispatching platform prefers to pair the customers and idle vehicles in a short matching time interval for the purpose of minimizing the waiting time of each customer. However, the results of this paper show that it may not always be true.