PORTALE DELLA DIDATTICA

Ricerca CERCA
  KEYWORD

Analisi e controllo di sistemi dinamici

Theses at Politecnico

Efficient scheduling and resource pooling for mobility networks

Reference persons GIACOMO COMO

Research Groups Analisi e controllo di sistemi dinamici

Description Traffic congestion and the resulting pollution are currently among the most pressing societal problems in both most advanced and developing countries across the world. The recent technological advancements in terms of sensing, information, and communication systems have created unprecedented opportunities to design smarter mobility systems that are able to reduce congestion and improve the quality of service to the users by better exploring the existing transport infrastructure capacity.

A key ingredient to address this challenge consists in designing efficient scheduling and resource pooling policies for such mobility systems.

We propose the following three master thesis themes related to taxi services and carpooling:

(1) Efficient taxi scheduling
This project considers the problem from the viewpoint of a taxi company operating in large city. First, a dynamic model for mobility demand and taxi service is introduced. Second, a resource allocation problem is defined using practical performance metrics such as delay at the customer, delay at the taxi, taxi occupancy, and drop-off rate as objectives and constraints. Idling and relocation policies for the taxis will be studied. A key aspect will consist in investigating the performance of centralized vs decentralized scheduling policies and the potential gains associated to online and anticipated anticipated orders. The proposed policies will be numerically tested on a simulation environment that uses freely available data-sets from the NYC taxi and limo commission with records of all taxi rides from three companies in NYC over past years. [2]

(2) Shareability and car-pooling in mobility systems
A well known way to better exploit the capacity of the existing transportation system consists in the sharing of vehicles. New information and communication technologies are making it possible to match real-time demand and supply effectively providing services that could replace public transportation with the on-demand qualities of individual mobility of taxis. In this thesis project, inspired by the recent work [1], the potential impact of carpooling systems is analysed by investigating how delay is impacted by vehicle occupancy. Upon introducing a dynamic model for mobility demand and vehicle supply, different car-pooling and scheduling policies are proposed and evaluated, especially taking into account quality-of-service measures such as delay and number of used vehicles for the user.

(3) Cooperation vs. competition among mobility providers
Several mobility providers operate in a city, typically in competition with each other. In this thesis, we focus on a relatively homogeneous class of them offering the same service, e.g., taxi companies and investigate cooperation vs. competition behaviours among them. Game-theoretic models are introduced and analysed to study: the feasibility and value of collaboration behaviours among taxi companies such as order redirection; issues of fairness towards drivers; incentive mechanisms to improve cooperation among taxi companies, fairness to the drivers, and the overall efficiency of the mobility system.


[1] P. Santi, G. Resta, M. Szell, S. Sobolevsky, S. H. Strogatz, and C. Ratti, “Quantifying the benefits of vehicle pooling with shareability networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol.111 (37), pp. 13290-13294, 2016.
[2] http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/statistics.shtml.


Deadline 06/08/2018      PROPONI LA TUA CANDIDATURA




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