Ride-Hailing App Strategies of Finnish Taxi Dispatch Organizations

The Finnish taxi industry has already long been technologically developed, and since 2011 taxi hailing apps have been available in Finland. The amount of these apps has steadily increased, spurred by the arrival of Uber and Taxify in Finland in 2014, and by the de-regulation of the Finnish taxi industry in July 2018. In the present paper, the aim was to identify ridehailing app acquisition related strategies that traditional Finnish dispatch organizations (DOs) employ. A qualitative case study with five focus organizations was conducted between 2018-2020. This study contributes to extant research in two ways. First, by identifying five ride-hailing app strategies employed by DOs (three related to the question of make vs. buy, two related to discontinuing/selling). Second, by showing that different ridehailing apps can play different strategic roles – which helps explain DOs’ multihoming strategy – and that the strategic role of a specific ride-hailing app can change over time

On the Relocation Behaviour of Ride-sourcing Drivers

Ride-sourcing drivers as individual service suppliers can freely adopt their own relocation strategies including waiting, cruising freely, or following the platform recommendations. These decisions substantially impact the balance between supply and demand, and consequently affect system performance. We conducted a stated choice experiment to study the searching behaviour of ride-sourcing drivers and examine novel policies. A unique dataset of 576 ride-sourcing drivers working in the US was collected and a choice modelling approach was used to estimate the effects of multiple existing and hypothetical attributes. The results suggest that relocation strategies of ride-sourcing drivers considerably vary between different groups of drivers. Surge pricing significantly stimulates drivers to head towards the designated areas. However, the distance between the location of drivers and surge or high-demand areas demotivates them to follow the platform repositioning recommendations. We discuss the implications of our findings for various platform policies on real-time information sharing and platform repositioning guidance

Battery capacity design for electric vehicles considering the diversity of daily vehicles miles traveled

In this paper, we study battery capacity design for battery electric vehicles (BEVs). The core of such design problems is to find a good tradeoff between minimizing the capacity to reduce financial costs of drivers and increasing the capacity to satisfy daily travel demands. The major difficulty of such design problems lies in modeling the diversity of daily travel demands. Based on massive trip records of taxi drivers in Beijing, we find that the daily vehicle miles traveled (DVMT) of a driver (e.g., a taxi driver) may change significantly in different days. This investigation triggers us to propose a mixture distribution model to describe the diversity in DVMT for various driver in different days, rather than the widely employed single distribution model. To demonstrate the merit of this new model, we consider value-at-risk and mean-variance battery capacity design problems for BEV, with respect to conventional single and new mixture distribution models of DVMT. Testing results indicate that the mixture distribution model better leads to better solutions to satisfy various drivers

Harnessing the power of the general public for crowdsourced business intelligence: a survey

International audienceCrowdsourced business intelligence (CrowdBI), which leverages the crowdsourced user-generated data to extract useful knowledge about business and create marketing intelligence to excel in the business environment, has become a surging research topic in recent years. Compared with the traditional business intelligence that is based on the firm-owned data and survey data, CrowdBI faces numerous unique issues, such as customer behavior analysis, brand tracking, and product improvement, demand forecasting and trend analysis, competitive intelligence, business popularity analysis and site recommendation, and urban commercial analysis. This paper first characterizes the concept model and unique features and presents a generic framework for CrowdBI. It also investigates novel application areas as well as the key challenges and techniques of CrowdBI. Furthermore, we make discussions about the future research directions of CrowdBI

Traffic Speed Prediction and Mobility Behavior Analysis Using On-Demand Ride-Hailing Service Data

Providing accurate traffic speed prediction is essential for the success of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) deployments. Accurate traffic speed prediction allows traffic managers take proper countermeasures when emergent changes happen in the transportation network. In this thesis, we present a computationally less expensive machine learning approach XGBoost to predict the future travel speed of a selected sub-network in Beijing\u27s transportation network. We perform different experiments for predicting speed in the network from future 1 min to 20 min. We compare the XGBoost approach against other well-known machine learning and statistical models such as linear regression and decision tree, gradient boosting tree, and random forest regression models. Three metrics MAE, MAPE, and RMSE are used to evaluate the performance of the selected models. Our results show that XGBoost outperforms other models across different experiment conditions. Based on the prediction accuracy of different links, we find that the number of vehicles operating in a network also affect prediction performance. In addition, understanding individual mobility behavior is critical for modeling urban dynamics. It provides deeper insights on the generative mechanisms of human movements. Recently, different types of emerging data sources such as mobile phone call detail records, social media posts, GPS observations, and smart card transactions have been used to analyze individual mobility behavior. In this thesis, we report the spatio-temporal mobility behaviors using large-scale data collected from a ride-hailing service platform. Based on passenger-level travel data, we develop an algorithm to identify users\u27 visited places and the functions of those places. To characterize temporal movement patterns, we reveal the differences in trip generation characteristics between commuting and non-commuting trips and the distribution of gap time between consecutive trips. To understand spatial mobility patterns, we observe the distribution of the number of visited place and their rank, the spatial distribution of residences and workplaces, and the distribution of travel distance and travel time. Our analysis highlights the differences in mobility patterns of the users of ride-hailing services, compared to the findings of existing mobility studies based on other data sources. Our study shows a tremendous potential of developing high-resolution individual-level mobility model that can predict the demand of emerging mobility services with high accuracy