Car2work: Shared Mobility Concept to Connect Commuters with Workplaces

Over the past decade there has been a surge of shared-use mobility concepts that are redefining how people move in urban areas. In this context, a new shared-use mobility concept, Car2work, that fills the gap between the existing approaches by integration of those approaches with the transit network is proposed. Car2work differs from the traditional dynamic ridesharing approaches in the following ways: ( a) it is designed for recurring trips; ( b) the concept of drivers is dropped; instead, vehicles that carry at least one commuter are used; ( c) commuters announce their trips in advance; and ( d) multiple trips per commuter are allowed during the day. The main goal is to connect commuters with workplaces but to guarantee a trip home and offer some degree of flexibility. The proposed shared mobility system is modeled as a pure binary problem that is solved with an exact solution method. The solution method decomposes the original problem into a master problem and a subproblem, aggregating over the vehicles and reducing the number of decision variables and constraints. A link reduction strategy based on spatiotemporal constraints is also implemented to reduce the number of decision variables. Numerical experiments were performed for two scenarios. The first scenario included 10 commuters with two trips each, three workplaces, two transit stations, and 15 transfer points. The second scenario comprised 25 commuters with two trips each, four workplaces, two transit stations, and 31 transfer points. It is demonstrated that consideration of the transit network increases the matching rate and reduces vehicle costs.