The ride-hailing sharing problem with parcel transportation

Abstract

This paper proposes a ride-hailing sharing problem with parcel transportation. In the study, both passengers and parcels can be transported by ordering the requests through a ride-hailing platform, in which the passengers can only be delivered by ride-hailing vehicles (RHVs) while parcels can be delivered by both RHVs and electric motorcycles (EMs). Compared with RHVs, EMs have a lower speed, a smaller capacity for parcels, and a lower driving cost per kilometer. Parcels are divided into eight classes according to the size of parcels (i.e., extra small, small, middle, and large) and the urgency of parcels (i.e., urgent and non-urgent). Passengers and passengers, passengers and parcels, as well as multiple parcels, are allowed to share the same vehicles in this problem. A two-level lexicographic multi-objective function is proposed from the perspective of the ride-hailing platform, where the first-level objective is to maximize the profit of the platform and the second-level objective is to minimize the total driving cost of RHVs and EMs. The time-varying property of passenger requests is considered and the proposed problem is divided into a set of continuous and small-scale ride-hailing subproblems. Each subproblem is formulated to match both passenger and parcel requests to RHVs and EMs, and to determine vehicle routes. Time window constraints, RHV capacity constraints for passengers, RHV trunk capacity constraints for parcels and luggage, and EM delivery box capacity constraints are considered. The modified artificial bee colony (MABC) algorithm is proposed based on the framework developed by Zhan et al. (2022) to solve the ride-hailing sharing problem with parcel transportation. The results of numerical experiments show that allowing RHVs to transport parcels can significantly increase the profit of the platform, the number of matched requests, and the average profit of RHV drivers. If RHVs are allowed to pick up parcels, the government should encourage the replacement of all EMs with RHVs under the more-passengers-fewer-parcels scenario. However, the government should not encourage the replacement of all EMs with RHVs and allow some EMs in the ride-hailing market under the fewer-passengers-more-parcels scenario.