The operator provides a vehicle fleet to meet the demand for the services. The size of the fleet and the capacity of each vehicle represent the potential used in planning. The operator also defines comfort conditions in order to increase utilization of the vehicles. These may include an additional (travel) time limit that individual passengers must accept, so that the operator can accommodate several passengers.
An essential part of the services offered are the pickup and dropoff points (pickup/dropoff nodes). The number of pickup and dropoff points is a subset of the modeled nodes. Passengers use them to enter and exit the system. The subset of the trip request’s start and end nodes, namely the actual origins and destinations, is usually larger. The paths resulting between start nodes and pickup points / dropoff points and end nodes must be covered on foot. The route choice for these footpaths is determined based on a shortest path search.
Holding areas are available in the network for the operation of the vehicles. These can be used as the initial starting point of the vehicles at the beginning of the calculation period. If no holding areas are used, the initial starting points of the vehicles are selected at random from the set of pickup and dropoff points. However, these holding areas also serve as waiting areas for vehicles to return to if they have not been assigned any trip requests at their current location for a defined period of time. This relocation of the vehicles avoids that vehicles remain unused at unprofitable locations in the network. Optionally, these holding areas can be assigned a capacity that limits the number of vehicles at that location.
If the fleet of the Ride Sharing service consists of vehicles with battery electric drive, they can be assigned a maximum range. The charging infrastructure is defined at nodes via a selected attribute. The maximum distance to a charging infrastructure is calculated from the network. This is used as the threshold of the remaining range to guide the vehicle to the next charging point. There the vehicle is fully charged and is not available to the dispatcher during this time. The duration of the charging process is calculated from the remaining charge and the entered default duration. The consumption of the vehicle is calculated over the distance traveled.
