April 26th, 2019: 1:30 PM-2:30 PM, Ketter Hall room 140, University at Buffalo, North Campus

Image of Professor Yafeng Yin.

Yafeng Yin, PhD Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Editor-in-Chief, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies

Macroscopic modeling of ride-sourcing systems: regulation and fundamental diagram

Ride-sourcing companies such as Uber, Lyft and Didi Chuxing are transforming the way people travel in cities. The companies provide ride-hailing applications that intelligently match riders to drivers; drivers are private car owners who drive their own vehicles to provide ride-for-hire services for profit. Since their advent in 2009, ride-sourcing companies have enjoyed huge success, but also created many controversies. In this talk, I will present research findings from a series of studies conducted by the Lab for Innovative Mobility Systems (LIMOS) since 2014, aiming to investigate the operations of ride-sourcing services, understand their impacts and implications, and develop policies to guide their deployment and manage their operations. I plan to discuss two specific issues. I will first present a macroscopic modeling framework for analyzing the ride-sourcing market and then derive insight for its regulatory policies. We then shift our focus to the supply side of the ride-sourcing system. By viewing it as an input/output system, I show that the output rate of the ride-system system (i.e., the number of riders arriving at their destinations per unit of time) can decline with accumulation (i.e., the number of riders in the system), and then discuss how control can avoid it.