IIMA Centre for Transportation and Logistics – Research Webinar on April 23, 2021

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Abstract

With the rapid development and popularization of mobile and communication technologies, dynamic ride-sharing platforms, as pioneers in a sharing economy context, provide on-demand shared mobility services and are disruptively changing the transportation industry. First, we study the coordination of platform demand and supply using prices and wages. We use a queueing model with endogenous supply and demand and present steady-state performance in equilibrium to determine the optimal price and wage that maximize the platform’s profit or social welfare. Second, we discuss the matching problem, in which the platforms match passengers and drivers in real-time considering multiple objectives such as platform revenue, pick-up distance, and service quality. We develop an efficient online matching policy and demonstrate its good performance through numerical experiments and implementation using real data.

About the Speaker

Dr. Wang is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Singapore Management University and a visiting faculty at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He received B.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. in operations research from MIT. His research focuses on methodologies of analytics and optimization, data-driven decision-making models, machine learning algorithms, and their applications in smart cities and urban systems. He has published in leading journals such as Transportation Science, American Economic Review P&P, M&SOM, and Transportation Research Part B. He serves as the guest editor for the Special Issue on Innovative Shared Transportation in Transportation Research Part B and Special Issue on Innovation in Transportation-Enabled Urban Services in Service Science, as a reviewer for over 40 academic journals. Dr. Wang was selected as Chan&Yun Rising Star Fellow in transportation and mobility, was nominated for the Goodwin Medal, MIT’s top teaching award for graduate students, and won the Excellent Teaching award for junior faculty at SMU. During his Ph.D. studies at MIT, he also served as the co-President of the MIT Chinese Students & Scholars Association and as Chair of the MIT-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum.