August 27th, 2018, in Room A716 of the New Main Building, Dr. Xiaolei Guo, anassociate professor from Management Science area of the Odette School of Business at the University of Windsor, was invited to give a lecture on “Commute Ride sharing with Uncertain Work End Time and Autonomous Vehicles”. Thelecture was hosted by Prof. Qiong Tian. Nearly twenty audiences attended,including professors and graduate students from Beihang University.
In this lecture,Dr. Guo firstly introduces the influence of autonomous vehicles (AV) on the ride sharing of trips in the travel network. By using the numerical experiment, he proves that AV can effectively increase the proportion of ridesharing trips and thus reduce the total travel cost.Secondly, he demonstratesthat AV can also reduce travel cost during the round-trip commute, in the case of single bottleneck congestion and random work end time. Dynamic userequilibria of the bottleneck congestion are analyzed for cases with and withoutAV. With AV, one always shares a ride with her partner from home to work in themorning, and either shares a ride or has an AV to pick her up from work to homein the evening, depending on the actual work end time. Without AV, the modechoice equilibrium of commuters could be that a) everyone drives alone, b)everyone shares ride, and c) part of the commuters share ride. In particular,each two of the three could emerge simultaneously as two stable mode choiceequilibria under certain conditions.These results imply that AV hasgreat potential to facilitate ridesharing in some cases, when activity durationuncertainty is considered.
After Dr. Guo’s talk, he answered teachers’ and students’ questions. This seminar isfruitful, and will be helpful for our modeling of commuting problem in the future.
Bio:Dr.Xiaolei Guo is an associate professor in the Management Science area of theOdette School of Business at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He isalso affiliated with the Cross-Border Institute at the University of Windsor.He holds a B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, received his PhD degree fromthe Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and worked as apost-doctoral associate at the University of Minnesota. His primary researchinterests are in the areas of road pricing, infrastructure planning, trafficnetwork modeling, and complex system optimization.
