An integrated dynamic ridesharing dispatch and idle vehicle repositioning strategy on a bimodal transport network

In bimodal ridesharing, a private on-demand mobility service operator offers to drop off a passenger at a transit station, where the passenger uses the transit network to get to another transit station, and the service operator guarantees picking up the passenger to drop them off at the final destination. Such collaborations with public transport agencies present a huge potential to increase the ridership. However, most existing studies on dynamic dial-a-ride/ridesharing mainly focus on mono-modal cases only. We consider dynamic bimodal ridesharing problems where real-time information is available to anticipate future demand. A new non-myopic vehicle dispatching and routing policy based on queueing-theoretical approach is proposed and integrated with a nonmyopicidle vehicle repositioning strategy to solve the problem. Several experiments are conducted to test the effectiveness of this integrated solution method and measure the benefit of bimodal cooperation. The proposed model and solution algorithm provides useful tools for real-time operating policy design of shared mobility.