How to disseminate reliable waiting time in app-based transportation services considering attractiveness and credibility

Abstract

Many app-based transportation services provide waiting time information to users before they book the services. Travel time is an important component of waiting time, and positive skew with a long upper tail is a basic characteristic of travel time variability. Waiting time information provision is expected to be reliable and easy to understand. However, the existing information provision forms involving travel time variability are either too optimistic in terms of having a high risk of delay or not easily understood by the users. This paper develops a conservative expected travel time approach with multiple cut points (MCET) for reporting reliable waiting time information to users in app-based transportation services. The MCET is modelled as the expected value of a discretized travel time distribution according to cut points. The numbers and locations of cut points are optimised by seeking a tradeoff between the attractiveness and credibility of the service platform.

KEYWORDS:

• Travel time variability
• reliability
• app-based transportation services
• waiting time dissemination
• conservative expected value

Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was supported by research grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72021002 and 71890973), and the Shanghai Rising-Star Programme (20QA1409800). These supports are gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 72021002 and 71890973]; the Shanghai Rising-Star Programme: [Grant Number 20QA1409800].