Ridesharing user equilibrium problem under OD-based surge pricing strategy

Abstract

Ridesharing is one of the effective urban traffic supply and demand management policies to reduce car ownership and mitigate traffic congestion. The origin-destination (OD) based surge pricing strategy is widely adopted by ridesharing service operators in practice due to its fairness and effectiveness. In this study, we aim to investigate the ridesharing user equilibrium (RUE) problem for an urban transportation network under the OD-based surge pricing strategy. We first build a variational inequality (VI) model for the proposed RUE problem. In particular, we explicitly formulate the necessary ride-matching constraints for the participants of multiple ridesharing services and rigorously demonstrate the existence and uniqueness of the RUE solution under some mild conditions. A parallel self-adaptive projection method (PSPM) incorporating column generation is developed to find an RUE solution for the large-scale problems. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to provide valuable insights and examine the effectiveness of the proposed solution method. The results quantitatively show that the ridesharing under the OD-based surge pricing strategy reduces not only the travel cost for travelers but also the deliberate detours. Traffic congestion is significantly mitigated by ridesharing. Moreover, the proposed solution method has satisfactory computational efficiency for solving the large-scale problems.