Emerging transportation systems such as ride-hailing and ride sharing are transforming urban mobility patterns and entail challenges to transportation planners. Switches between different transportation modes are rarely analyzed.

The goal of this paper is to model the interactions of different transportation modes such as public transport and solo driving, ride-hailing and ride sharing. The authors propose a traffic equilibrium model for a coupled morning-evening network, in which travelers can change the transportation mode between the morning and the evening commute.

The authors analyze the costs and the constraints of this framework and propose a variational inequality model with a nonlinear convex cost function, as well as an equivalent mixed complementarity problem (MiCP).

The authors rely on Artelys Knitro to solve the MiCP model. The presented coupled morning-evening solution is compared to decoupled models, which optimize first the morning commute then the evening one, or vice-versa. Results obtained on a well-established network example show that the least path costs and the calculated number of drivers in the proposed model are nearly 10% smaller than those obtained with decoupled models.

Authors: Wei Gu (University of Southern California, LosAngeles, CA, USA), Michael Zhang (University of California Davis, Davis,CA, USA), Maged Dessouky and Jong-Shi Pang (University of Southern California, LosAngeles, CA, USA)