Presentation from 2017 INFORMS Annual Meeting of recently published research is now available here.

We have four presentations at INFORMS Annual Meeting being presented at the Convention Center in Houston. They will all be in rm 361C at the Convention Center except for the presentation from Mehdi Nourinejad (which will be in Rm 332B):

One of the biggest challenges in operating on-demand mobility services is the need to dynamically reposition idle vehicles, whether they are taxis, shared vehicles/bikes, or empty shuttles. This latest research with Dr. Hamid R. Sayarshad at Cornell University proposes new models and algorithms to anticipate future demand for the problem by approximating future opportunity costs with queue delay. In addition, we formulated a lower bound of the queueing-based location model from Marianov & Serra that can be solved much more computationally efficiently. Simulation tests in a controlled study area with NYC taxi data suggests the feasibility of nearly 30% improvement over myopic positioning techniques that do not use data to look ahead.

This work was initially undertaken when Hamid was a PhD student with funding support from the Canada Research Chairs program. Resources from C2SMART are also acknowledged.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1366554517300121

Gisselle, one of undergraduate summer researchers at BUILT, is the recipient of the Susan Kupferman Memorial Undergraduate Scholarship from WTS. She will receive the award at the WTS Gala at the Battery Park Garden on October 4th. Congrats!

In the latest MIT Technology Review article, “The Startup Behind NYC’s Plan to Replace Phone Booths with 7,500 Connected Kiosks“, Elizabeth Woyke interviews Prof. Chow about the role that public kiosks can play to relay information.

Recently, TLC announced using Via’s software to enable yellow taxi sharing (https://lnkd.in/dxf-MU9) in favor of a taxi sharing policy. Our latest NSF-funded paper with researchers from NYU Tandon, CUSP, and Courant (Ziyi Ma, Matthew Urbanek, Maria Alejandra Pardo Baquero, Xuebo Lai), now in press, quantifies this benefit for riders that use taxi to access the airport (~10% improvement in consumer surplus) and demonstrate how different matching policies can significantly affect the spatial distribution of that benefit.

Ziyi Ma was supported by the NYU Undergraduate Summer Research Program. Joseph Chow was partially supported by National Science Foundation grant CMMI-1634973. The JFK airport taxi mode choice survey was shared by PANYNJ, which is gratefully acknowledged.

The open access paper can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2046043017300217.

Our work on simulation-based evaluation of Mobility as a Service as a “2-sided market” is now published in TR Part B. The goal in this work is to develop a tool that can compare “apples to oranges” where the MaaS operator’s decisions and policies are also dependent on user interaction–whether at “within day” level or at “day-to-day” level of dependency. For example, this would allow a city agency to compare the welfare effects of a TNC with a particular surge pricing policy (within day dependency) with another scenario where an EV car sharing company may alter fleet size, composition, pricing policies over time (day-to-day).

Dr. Djavadian was supported by the Canada Research Chairs program and an NSERC Discovery Grant. Prof. Chow was partly supported by the C2SMART University Transportation Center. An early version of this work was presented at IATBR 2015 in Windsor, UK.

Congratulations to these two students on passing their qualifying exams today!