A novel facility location problem for taxi hailing platforms: A two-stage neighborhood search heuristic approach
Industrial Management & Data Systems
ISSN: 0263-5577
Article publication date: 15 January 2020
Issue publication date: 22 March 2020
Abstract
Purpose
Motivated by a problem in the context of DiDi Travel, the biggest taxi hailing platform in China, the purpose of this paper is to propose a novel facility location problem, specifically, the single source capacitated facility location problem with regional demand and time constraints, to help improve overall transportation efficiency and cost.
Design/methodology/approach
This study develops a mathematical programming model, considering regional demand and time constraints. A novel two-stage neighborhood search heuristic algorithm is proposed and applied to solve instances based on data sets published by DiDi Travel.
Findings
The results of this study show that the model is adequate since new characteristics of demand can be deduced from large vehicle trajectory data sets. The proposed algorithm is effective and efficient on small and medium as well as large instances. The research also solves and presents a real instance in the urban area of Chengdu, China, with up to 30 facilities and demand deduced from 16m taxi trajectory data records covering around 16,000 drivers.
Research limitations/implications
This study examines an offline and single-period case of the problem. It does not consider multi-period or online cases with uncertainties, where decision makers need to dynamically remove out-of-service stations and add other stations to the selected group.
Originality/value
Prior studies have been quite limited. They have not yet considered demand in the form of vehicle trajectory data in facility location problems. This study takes into account new characteristics of demand, regional and time constrained, and proposes a new variant and its solution approach.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of NSFC under Grant No. 71821002 and NSFC project under Grant No. 71571160. The authors also wish to express their gratitude to the data source: DiDi GAIA Initiative.
Citation
Ma, H., Shen, N., Zhu, J. and Deng, M. (2020), "A novel facility location problem for taxi hailing platforms: A two-stage neighborhood search heuristic approach", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 120 No. 3, pp. 526-546. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-07-2019-0380
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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