Ride-sharing has become ubiquitous in many metropolises attributed to its affordability, convenience and flexibility. This thesis will develop dynamic pricing methods for ride-sharing services to improve its competitiveness in multi-modal transportation systems. A market equilibrium model for ride-sharing services with a consideration of passenger preference in a multi-modal transportation system is built at the network level where network structure and origin-destination (OD) demand pattern are explicitly counted. Moreover, the method to calculate the system endogenous variables (e.g., ride-sharing demand, expected waiting time, and expected detour time) in the equilibrium is also deduced. A statedpreference survey data regarding the mode choice within private car, public transport and ride-sharing services are utilized to estimate the passenger preference. To reveal the operation difference of ride-sharing in different scale networks, a handmade network and the Munich network are adopted in the experiments. We propose a unified pricing method where the trip fare is linearly increasing with the travel distance with the same unit price for all OD pairs over the network. A Gradient Descent (GD) algorithm is derived to optimize the operation strategy (trip fare and vehicle fleet size) for the monopoly optimum (MO) scenario and first-best social optimum (SO) scenario. The results show that the optimal unit price for MO is greater than that for SO, while the optimal vehicle fleet size is smaller. And the difference between optimal vehicle fleet sizes in two scenarios becomes greater in the high demand level situation, while the difference between optimal unit prices almost keeps the same. Besides, a spatial pricing method is introduced to account for the spatial heterogeneity of the level of demand over the network by applying different unit prices for different OD pairs. Similarly, a GD algorithm is derived to optimize the operation strategy. It is found that the optimal unit prices are linear to their distance and ride-sharing demand with negative slopes. Last but not least, a novel utility-based compensation method is proposed to improve the level-of-service (LOS) and equity of ride-sharing services without or with a very limited sacrifice of the operation objectives. We can also observe an increase in ride-sharing demand with this method.     «

Ride-sharing has become ubiquitous in many metropolises attributed to its affordability, convenience and flexibility. This thesis will develop dynamic pricing methods for ride-sharing services to improve its competitiveness in multi-modal transportation systems. A market equilibrium model for ride-sharing services with a consideration of passenger preference in a multi-modal transportation system is built at the network level where network structure and origin-destination (OD) demand patter...     »