Urban co-modality transportation : a shared system ensuring passenger and freight cohabitation

Abstract

Efficient and sustainable transport is essential for quality-oriented urban development. Passengers increasingly expect convenient and low-cost ways to move around the city and freight must be handled quickly to minimize warehouse size and related operating costs. Recently, urban co-modality is emerging as an integrated solution for merging passenger and freight flows into a single transport system. It advocates the shared use of public transport resources between passengers and freight, which has been widely considered a promising approach for increasing the efficiency and sustainability of the urban transport system. This thesis conducts a comprehensive study on the urban co-modality from strategic, tactical and operational levels, which cover the problems of stakeholder interaction, management system design and daily operation decisions. Accordingly, three scenarios are proposed in this thesis. The first scenario develops game theoretical models to quantify the operators’ decision-making and the overall co-modal system performance in the urban co-modality. The freight operator holds the direct channel and purchases the co-modality service from the transit operator. Moreover, an incentive strategy is designed to explore the potential benefit of co-modality for transit passengers. Specifically, a proportion of the total co-modality service revenue obtained by the transit operator will be used as subsidies to incentivize transit ridership. We find that urban co-modality is feasible and promising if the associated freight transferring and transportation process is cost-effective. With a properly designed passenger incentive strategy, co-modality will not only generate profits for operators but also bring benefits to transit passengers and freight service customers. The second scenario proposes a crowdsource-enabled co-modality transportation system (CCTS) and introduces a technical framework that can serve as a logical reference for developing and implementing the management platform of urban co-modality. The practical investigations show that the practitioners are especially worried about the urban co-modality in terms of information sharing, decision support and operational feasibility. In addition, an online survey on passengers’ crowdsourcing intention shows that passengers are worried about liability risks and operational difficulties instead of privacy risks. This scenario also discusses the potential operational issues and demonstrates the significance of forward-looking information for decision-making in the CCTS. The third scenario focuses on the operational decision problem in crowdsourced co-modality transportation (CCT). In the CCT, passengers are viewed as an external crowd who volunteer to participate in logistics activities and enjoy compensation. A synchronization mechanism between passengers and parcels is thereby proposed. The resulting problem is formalized and solved by a population-based variable neighborhood search procedure. Experimental results reveal that the proposed crowdsourced co-modality transportation performs better in both handling capacity and distributing efficiency if more passengers are willing to participate. Besides, we find that CCT benefits from the higher degree of variability of passenger traveling distance.