SKM 2023 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 10: Traffic Dynamics, Urban and Regional Systems I
SOE 10.1: Talk
Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 15:00–15:15, ZEU 260
The random walks of ridepooling — •Benjamin Köhler1, Philip Marszal1, Marc Timme1,2, and Malte Schröder1 — 1Chair for Network Dynamics, Institute of Theoretical Physics & Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed), TU Dresden — 2Lakeside Labs, Klagenfurt, Austria
Ridepooling services have become an increasingly attractive mobility option in urban areas. As users issue requests for transport, ridepooling vehicles drive through the road network, continually adjusting their routes to pick up and deliver users with similar trips in shared rides. The quality of such services strongly depends on the dynamics of evolving vehicle routes, which collectively emerge from the interactions of the vehicles and requests. So far, theories of ridepooling services have focused on macroscopic and mean-field dynamics, neglecting the underlying microscopic route evolution. Here we analyze the structure and dynamics of these random routes in the limit of high service efficiency. We find an emerging random walk of a route that is specified not only by the current location of the vehicle, but also by the route planned ahead to pick up or drop off passengers who are currently transported in the vehicle or have already requested a ride. We map this process to an ordinary Markov random walk on an abstract graph whose nodes represent the shortest paths of the original street network. We thereby identify emerging routing patterns and evaluate their implications for the ridepooling service. Understanding these random route processes may help to further advance service quality, for instance by designing stop networks and routing algorithms to maximize flexibility.