EuroTech grant for Frits Spieksma
A EuroTech grant has been awarded to Frits Spieksma for his project 'Online Optimization and Mechanism Design for Various Shared Vehicles: towards Integrated Mobility with Flexible Bookings'. In this project post-doc researcher Kevin Luo will be involved for two years.
Subject of the project
In the modern era of urban mobility, vehicle-sharing is becoming one of the most popular and efficient transportation services. Vehicle sharing systems are pushing private vehicles out of the mobility system, and they are alleviating current traffic congestion thereby improving environmental issues. However, each vehicle system pursues its development independently, and little is known about the cooperation of various shared vehicles. In reality, the needs of a user and the progress of urban mobility require multiple vehicles to work collaboratively. An integrated vehicle sharing system has the potential to address this issue.
We aim to investigate the foundations for online optimization and mechanisms for an integrated vehicle sharing system and to apply these to relevant cases encountered in real-life applications. Specific goals include to allocate various vehicle resources to travel requests by applying optimal or near-optimal online algorithms to achieve good performance on customer satisfaction; and to extend vehicle sharing models and techniques to reduce the loss of efficiency by implementing mechanisms and policies.
We identify three key challenges:
- The combination of multiple types of vehicles cannot be effectively guaranteed for users who request specific travel route and travel time;
- Schedule the requests that arrived over time without any knowledge of the future;
- Design effective mechanisms and policies.
The resulting integration of various shared vehicles will have a significant impact on urban mobility and have the potential to achieve better performance on customer satisfaction or system efficiency.