A parking incentive allocation problem for ridesharing systems

Ridesharing occurs when people with similar schedules and itineraries travel together to reduce their commuting costs. In this paper, we study how parking spaces can be used to incentivize drivers to participate in ridesharing systems. We develop a Parking Incentive Allocation (PIA) system to promote and allocate parking lots to ridesharing drivers in a stochastic and dynamic environment. The optimization problem is formulated at each period as a multi-stage stochastic decision-dependent program. To overcome the complexity of the model, we propose one greedy policy, and three approximations including two stochastic policies and an expected-value policy. We evaluate the effectiveness of the four policies on the data generated from GPS information collected by the MTL Trajet project, which studies residents’ travel patterns throughout the city of Montreal. The computational results indicate that on average, the approximate policies can improve the total distance saving by more than 20% over various problem settings. Additionally, the results show that the performance of the PIA system is significantly influenced by the attractiveness of the parking incentive to drivers.