Benefits of Short-Distance Walking and Fast-Route Scheduling in Public Vehicle Service

• Published in: IEEE transactions on intelligent transportation systems Vol. 21; no. 9; pp. 3706 - 3717
• Main Authors: Li, Ning, Kong, Linghe, Shu, Wei, Wu, Min-You
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.09.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computer simulation; Driving; efficiency; Legged locomotion; Low speed; passenger delivery; Passengers; Public transportation; Public vehicle; Roads; Schedules; Scheduling; Urban areas; Urban transportation; Vehicles; Walking
• ISSN: 1524-9050; 1558-0016
• DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2019.2931798

Public vehicle service (PVS), as a paradigm to manage and share large-capacity vehicles for public passenger delivery, is promising to improve the quality of urban transportation. In the PVS system, a command center receives requests sent by passengers, periodically assigns them to public vehicles and schedules vehicle routes to serve the requests. However, in the PVS system, the passengers' waiting time is not well utilized. Moreover, it is observed that the driving distance on low-speed roads accounts for a rather high percentage. These two factors impact on system efficiency. In order to utilize the waiting time, we propose to let passengers walk a short distance instead of standing at their origins. At the same time, the driving distance on low-speed roads will be reduced. In this paper, the closest meeting point algorithm is proposed to address the challenge of determining the best pick-up and drop-off locations. The large-scale simulations show that the passenger walking and the proposed fast-route scheduling strategy can shorten the total vehicle travel distance by 34%.