01332975

Component

This paper presents a simulation procedure to assess the market potential for the implementation of shared taxi services in urban areas. The proposed shared service has a new organizational design and pricing scheme which aims to use the capacity in traditional taxi services in a more efficient way. In this system, a taxi acting in “sharing” mode offers lower prices to its clients, in exchange for them to accept sharing the vehicle with other persons who have compatible trips (time and space), while also increasing the revenue for the operator. The paper proposes an agent based simulation model in which a set of rules for space and time matching between the shared taxis and passengers is identified which considers a maximum deviation from the original route and then presents an algorithm that seeks to optimize different objectives such as minimum cost per passenger.km, maximum revenue per vehicle.km, minimum passenger total in vehicle time, minimum vehicle idle time and equity among different taxis in the fleet. An experiment for Lisbon (Portugal) was conducted in order to test the model. Results point for the usefulness of such model in order to test the effect of different regular/shared taxi fleet compositions on a number of performance indicators such as average revenue, number of active taxis, taxi occupancy rates, and average waiting time for a taxi. With proper tuning and accurate survey data on the taxi market and consumer preferences this model shows great promise in order to help decision makers determining optimized parameters for taxi operations in order to improve level of service and the operators revenue through a more efficient use of the vehicles’ capacity.

The DVD lists the title of this paper as: Agent-Based Simulation Procedure for Measuring Market Potential of Shared Taxis: Application to Lisbon Municipality.

01329018

11-3147

English

17p

2011

Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (19) ; Tables (2)

Public transit; Ridesharing; Simulation; Taxicab companies; Urban areas

Shared taxi

Lisbon (Portugal)

Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2011 Paper #11-3147

TRIS, TRB

Feb 17 2011 6:25PM