Ride-hailing services have the potential to play a major role within future transport systems. While the operation as well as environmental, social and economic consequences are research subjects, the focus in the literature lies on system efficiency and profitability. In this study, vehicle relocation strategies are investigated with respect to service provision equity using an agent-based simulation approach. The aim is to identify ways of operation that support social fairness while maintaining the profitability and effectiveness of the service. The results show that a typical demand-anticipatory relocation strategy leads to an imbalance in the spatial distribution of mean wait times for the use case of Berlin. This can be significantly improved by applying different relocation strategies. As a consequence, the overall demand for the system rises while the ratio of empty vehicle kilometres increases slightly.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.