Measuring Maximum Urban Capacity of Taxi-Based Logistics

Abstract

City-wide package delivery becomes popular due to the dramatic rise of online shopping. In order to speed up the package delivery process without increasing the delivery cost, a promising system has been proposed, which leverages the crowdsourced taxis. Many efforts have been done on this novel system in recent literature. However, a fundamental problem still remains open, i.e., measuring the maximum capacity of taxi-based logistics at the urban scale. In this paper, we first propose an accurate and efficient measurement mechanism to tackle this problem in the Non-stop package delivery method. The basic idea is to construct a spatial-temporal graph according to the passenger demands and calculate the maximum urban capacity by combining the results of several carefully designed max-flow problems. Then, we expand our measurement mechanism to be used in other taxi-based package delivery methods after a few adaptations, including the One-hop method and the Stop-and-wait method. At last, we evaluate our measurement mechanism and compare the maximum urban capacity of various package delivery methods with a real-world dataset from an online taxi-taking platform.