Piggyback on Idle Ride-Sourcing Drivers for Integrated On-Demand and Flexible Intracity Parcel Delivery Services.

This article investigates spatial pricing and fleet management strategies for an integrated platform that simultaneously offers on-demand ride-sourcing services and intracity parcel delivery services, including both on-demand and flexible delivery modes that utilize the idle time of ride-sourcing drivers. A semi-Markov process (SMP) model is developed to characterize drivers’ status transitions and service quality across a transportation network with limited vehicle capacity, while an economic equilibrium model captures the incentives of passengers, delivery customers, drivers, and the platform. The platform’s profit-maximization problem is formulated as a nonconvex optimization, and a customized algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve it. A case study of San Francisco validates the model and reveals that flexible delivery services complement ride-sourcing by utilizing idle drivers without adversely affecting passengers, whereas on-demand delivery competes for driver resources; thus, the integrated model benefits the platform and drivers overall but may not always favor passengers, depending on delivery demand levels and spatial demand distributions.