Share-a-ride problems: Models and Solution Algorithms

Some of today's greatest challenges in urban environments concern individual mobility and rapid parcel delivery. Given the surge of e-commerce and the ever-increasing volume of goods to be delivered, we explore possible logistic solutions by proposing algorithms to add parcel-transport services to ride-hailing systems. Toward this end, we present and solve mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulations of the share-a-ride problem and quantitatively analyze the service revenues and use of vehicle resources. We create five scenarios that represent joint transportation situations for parcels and people, and that consider different densities in request types and different requirements for vehicle resources. For one scenario, we propose an alternative MILP formulation that significantly reduces computation times. The proposed model also improves scalability by solving instances with 260% more requests than those solved with general MILP. The results show that the greatest profit margins occur when several parcels share trips with customers. In contrast, with all metrics considered, the worst results occur when parcels and people are transported in separate dedicated vehicles. The integration of parcel services in ride-hailing systems also reduces vehicle waiting times when the number of parcel requests exceeds the number of ride-hailing customers.