An agent‐based simulation model to assess the impacts of introducing a shared‐taxi system: an application to Lisbon (Portugal)

Abstract

Summary This paper presents a new concept of urban shared‐taxi services. The proposed system has a new organisational design and pricing scheme that aims to use the capacity in traditional taxi services in a more efficient way. In this system, a taxi acting in ‘sharing’ mode offers lower prices to its clients, in exchange for them to accept sharing the vehicle with other persons who have compatible trips (time and space). The paper proposes and tests an agent‐based simulation model in which a set of rules for space and time matching between a request of a client and the candidate shared taxis is identified. It considers that the client is only willing to accept a maximum deviation from his or her direct route and establishes an objective function for selecting the best candidate taxi. The function considers the minimum travel time combination of pickup and drop‐off of all the pool of clients sharing each taxi while allowing to establish a policy of bonuses to competing taxis with certain number of occupants. An experiment for the city of Lisbon is presented with the objectives of testing the proposed simulation conceptual model and showing the potential of sharing taxis for improving mobility management in urban areas. Results show that the proposed system may lead to significant fare and travel time savings to passengers, while not jeopardising that much the taxi revenues. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Exploring the impact of shared autonomous vehicles on urban parking demand: An agent-based simulation approach

“…Agatz et al (2011) developed a simulation of dynamic ride-sharing by linking trips and vehicles to minimize the system level VMT generation. Martinez et al (2012) proposed an agent based shared-taxi system that matched clients with taxis by minimizing the total travel time for both on-board and calling passengers. developed their version of dynamic ride-sharing SAV model with more flexible objective function to maximize the possibility of ride-sharing.…”

Insights into carsharing demand dynamics: Outputs of an agent-based model application to Lisbon, Portugal

“…Several studies have analyzed, through simulations, the role of shared mobility services either as additional service in the mobility market (Martinez, Correia, & Viegas, 2015), or by fully deployed systems that would replace all motorized mobility in a city (Fagnant & Kockelman, 2014;International Transport Forum Corporate Partnership Board, 2015;Zachariah, Gao, Kornhauser, & Mufti, 2013).…”

Analysis of the pattern and intensity of urban activities through aggregate cellphone usage

“…recently(Correia and Viegas 2011; Correia and Antunes 2012;Martínez et al 2014;Jorge et al 2014). However to implement these measures there is the need to have an accurate description of the mobility patterns and activities that take place in the city anddue to budget limitations of public authorities mobility surveys are not done systematically.…”