The Share-a-Ride Problem with mixed ride-hailing and logistic vehicles

Abstract: This study explores the potential of using ride-hailing vehicles (RVs) for integrated passenger and freight transport based on shared mobility. In this crowd-sourced mode, ride-hailing platforms can profit from parcel delivery services, and logistics companies can reduce operational costs by utilizing the capacities of RVs. The Share-a-Ride problem with ride-hailing and logistic vehicles (SARP-RL) determines the number of logistic vehicles (LVs) and the assignment of passenger/parcel requests to RVs and LVs, aiming at maximizing the total RV profits and minimizing logistic costs. An exact solution framework is proposed by (1) generating a feasible trip that serves a given set of requests at maximal profits; (2) generating all feasible trips for the entire set of passenger and parcel requests via an efficient enumeration method; and (3) finding all Pareto-optimal solutions of the bi-objective problem via an $\varepsilon$-constraint method. Not only is the proposed method exact, it also converts the NP-hard problem to a simple vehicle-trip matching problem. More importantly, the total computational time can be compressed to an arbitrary degree via straightforward parallelization. A case study of the Manhattan network demonstrates the solution characteristics of SARP-RL. The results indicate that: (i) Coordinating RV and LV operations to serve passenger and parcel requests (SARP-RL) can simultaneously reduce logistic costs and increase RV profits. (ii) Key factors influencing the performance of SARP-RL include the RV fleet size, spatial distribution of parcel requests, passenger/parcel request ratio, and unit price of transport service, which are quantitatively analyzed to offer managerial insights for real-world implementation.