Simulating on-demand person and food transport with intra-day vehicle reconfiguration in Paris

Abstract

Mobility-on-demand (MoD) services for passenger trips are extensively studied in the literature. Quantitative methodologies relying on agent-based mobility simulations, such as MATSim, allow assessing such systems in realistic settings and aid their design and sizing. Similarly, MoD services for parcel deliveries and logistics are gaining interest in the research community around agent-based simulations. The paper at hand presents a work investigating the potential of mixed MoD services for passengers and goods where vehicles must perform physical reconfigurations to switch from each demand type. A demand-dependant reconfiguration planning algorithm is proposed and the mixed service compared against using two separate fleets to assess the potential advantage. This work is highly reproducible and presents a technical contribution to the MATSim tool to allow such simulations to be performed.