Leveraging Eclipse MOSAIC for Modeling and Analyzing Ride-Hailing Services

TL;DR

The paper presents a MOSAIC-based ride-hailing modeling framework integrated with the BeST Berlin traffic scenario to study city-scale efficiency and environmental impacts. By adapting MOSAIC with ride-hailing-specific data, logbook-driven validation, and three post-ride rebalancing strategies, the authors demonstrate notable reductions in mileage and emissions, particularly under Waiting and hotspot-based rebalancing. The approach highlights the potential of city-wide, data-driven simulations to inform policy and operator decisions, while acknowledging simplifications that could be addressed with richer dispatching algorithms. The work offers a practical pathway to digital-twin style ITS assessments for ride-hailing and its environmental footprint in urban contexts.

Abstract

Ride-hailing services enjoy a large popularity in the sector of individualized mobility. Due to broad availability, ease of use, and competitive pricing strategies, these services have established themselves throughout the last decades. With the increased popularity, ride-hailing providers aimed to consistently improve the efficiency of their services, leading to the inception of novel research questions. Many of which can be effectively tackled using simulation. In this paper, we present such a simulation-based approach using Eclipse MOSAIC in-hand with a large-scale traffic scenario of Berlin. We analyze real-world logbook data including detailed shifts of drivers and discuss how to integrate them with the simulation scenario. Moreover, we present extensions to MOSAIC required for the modeling of the ride-hailing services, utilizing the powerful Application Simulator. Accordingly, as the primary result of this paper, we managed to extend the Eclipse MOSAIC framework to be able to answer research questions in the domain of ride-hailing and ride-sharing. Additionally, in an initial exemplary study, we analyze the traffic and environmental impacts of different, yet basic, rebalancing strategies, finding non-negligible differences in mileages and pollutant emissions. We, furthermore, applied our findings to the entire ride-hailing fleet in the city of Berlin for one year, showcasing the impacts different rebalancing strategies could have on environment and general traffic. To our knowledge, the consideration of environmental factors on a city-wide scale is a novel contribution of this paper, not addressed in previous research.