Management of On-demand Transport Services in Urban Contexts. Barcelona Case Study

Urban mobility transport mostly focuses on collective transport based on largely exploited models such as metro, trains or buses. The basis of current public transport is a fix network of both infrastructure and services, presenting a high lack of flexibility, especially regarding geographical issues. Traditional and innovative on-demand transport services, such as taxi and carsharing respectively, can provide the level of flexibility to the public transport needed to provide both a better service while reducing the exploitation costs. In this context, the study aims to improve the efficiency of on-demand transport systems, mainly taxi and carsharing through the development of analytical models and their application to the city of Barcelona. The optimization of the fleet management and the allocation of resources aim to ensure both the level of service of public transport users and the agency's profitability. The decision variables are the fleet size (number of vehicles) as well as the number and capacity of the depots or stands. Two models are presented, one for the provision of taxi stand service and one for the provision of one way carsharing service. Both models are applied to the demand for taxi services of the city of Barcelona, presenting for each model the optimum number of vehicles and depots, the depots’ capacity, the system unitary costs and the level of service. Although the results show that the performance of both systems is very similar, the taxi service is up to three times more expensive due to the extra cost from the need for having a driver.