Combining Survival Analysis and Simheuristics to Predict the Risk of Delays in Urban Ridesharing Operations with Random Travel Times

More sustainable transportation and mobility concepts, such as ridesharing, are gaining momentum in modern smart cities. In many real-life scenarios, travel times among potential customers' locations should be modeled as random variables. This uncertainty makes it difficult to design efficient ridesharing schedules and routing plans, since the risk of possible delays has to be considered as well. In this paper, we model ridesharing as a stochastic team orienteering problem in which the trade-off between maximizing the expected reward and the risk of incurring time delays is analyzed. In order to do so, we propose a simulation-optimization approach that combines a simheuristic algorithm with survival analysis techniques. The aforementioned methodology allows us to generate not only the probability that a given routing plan will suffer a delay, but also gives us the probability that the routing plan experiences delays of different sizes.