City-wide vehicle dispatching for multi-hop ridesharing package delivery

The city-wide ridesharing package delivery is becoming popular as it provides a convenience such as extra profits to the vehicle’s driver and high traffic efficiency to the city. The vehicle dispatching is a significant issue to improve the ridesharing efficiency in package delivery. The classic one-hop ridesharing package delivery requires the highly similar paths between the package and the vehicle given by the limited detour time, which depresses the ridesharing efficiency. To tackle this problem, a city-wide vehicle dispatching strategy for the multi-hop ridesharing package delivery was proposed, where a package is permitted to be delivered sequentially by different vehicles, until arriving the destination. The study formulates the vehicle dispatching as a maximum multi-dimensional bipartite matching problem with the goal of maximizing the total saving distance given by the limited detour time and ridesharing capacity. A multi-hop ridesharing vehicle dispatching algorithm was proposed to solve this problem by selecting the farthest reachable locker and multi-dimensional matching. Simulation results based on real vehicle dataset of Beijing demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed vehicle dispatching strategy.