Temporal Friction in On-demand Assigned Mobility: Short-term decisions, long-term dynamics, and the limits of optimisation
Mon, Jul 07, 2025
SPEAKER: Andres Fielbaum 助理教授 悉尼大学
TIME/DATE: 2025.7.9 10:00
CLASSROOM: A1201
ABSTRACT:
App-based, on-demand transport systems have transformed mobility by enabling real-time assignment of passengers to vehicles. But behind this flexibility lies a fundamental tension: short-term operational decisions can produce long-term system consequences. This talk will explore these temporal frictions in assigned on-demand systems—where passengers and vehicles are matched before meeting—through the lens of three key challenges:
1. Vehicle Dynamics: We show how assignment decisions lead to the Increasing Gap Dynamics, a negative feedback cycle where vehicles tend to concentrate.
2. Anticipatory Design: From routing to pickup/dropoff locations, the best decisions often depend on future, uncertain requests. We present anticipatory methods that improve service while confronting real-world user acceptance limits.
3. Unreliability: Sharing a vehicle creates dependencies among users. We introduce the shareability shadow concept to quantify and mitigate such unreliability.
Together, these challenges underscore the limits of myopic optimisation without foresight, and the need for adaptive, forward-looking strategies in shared mobility systems.
GUEST BIO:
Andres Fielbaum is a Mathematical Engineer with an MSc in Transport Engineering and a PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Chile. He is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney, where he leads the project “Next Generation of On-Demand Public Transport: Strategies and Algorithms”, funded by the Australian Research Council’s competitive DECRA scheme. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cognitive Robotics at TU Delft. His research focuses on public and on-demand transport, transport networks, emerging mobility technologies, and algorithmic approaches to transport system design.
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