Study on the minimum fleet size based on deadheading time threshold

Abstract

By integrating travel demand and car-hailing supply information, the car-hailing platforms have realized a more targeted non-cruise mobile order receiving mode. That reduces the deadheading (DH) time and the number of online car-hailing vehicles. This result will lead to a significant change in the number of online car-hailing vehicles. This paper studies the minimum fleet size based on deadheading time threshold. Then Then we use Suzhou taxi data to solve the minimum number of vehicles. Firstly, the space-time description of online car-hailing operation was established to study the influence of the DH time threshold on the total number of vehicles. The results show that the total number of vehicles decreases with the increase of the DH time threshold, and the trend tends to be gentle. Secondly, this paper discusses the relationship between the time cost of passenger and driver and the DH time threshold. Thirdly, this paper discussed the influence of the number of car-hailing platforms on the total number of vehicles, and it proves that the total number of vehicles in the multi-platform market is larger than that monopolized by a single platform. Finally, the feasibility of the research is verified by using Suzhou taxi data. Meanwhile, it proves that the minimum total number of vehicles has a certain robustness.